Gun Control Debate

I’ve been contemplating this post for a while, ever since the gun control debate came to the forefront of the national political conversation in the wake of the Newton school shooting. Unfortunately, I’ve been too busy to blog but now seems as good a time as any to discuss it. After all, opponents of gun control repeat the same mantra when the conversation starts in the hours and days following one of these all too frequent tragedies. It’s too soon. We can’t talk about gun control when families are still burying the victims of the tragedy. We’ll talk about it as a more appropriate time.

My Tragedy-Meter tells me that no significant gun violence has occurred recently. That’s not to say that no one has died from gunfire in the last little while. With over 11,000 deaths a year from guns in the United States, we average over 30 gun deaths every single day so the chances that no one has died from a gunshot wound in the last 24 hours are between slim and none. No one can accuse me of taking advantage of the victims of a recent tragedy though I’m sure some gun fetishist would likely try.

Let’s have a little background then. I was born, raised and have lived my entire life in Mississippi. My first 13 years of life were spent in the country and by country, I mean COUNTRY. The closest town was miles away and that “town” were what we termed “eyeblinks” – as in blink your eye while driving through and you miss it. I know a little something about guns. I grew up with guns. I’ve shot pistols, shotguns, rifles and BB/pellet guns as well as paintball guns in later life. I’ve hunted though not with the organization of deer hunters at camps so much as hunting birds and squirrels in our yard (yard being several acres worth of forest). I grew up in a Republican-leaning household. When I was the age of 8, our house in the middle of the boonies was broken into and most of our shit stolen. When I was 23, I was robbed at gunpoint outside a local coffee shop though the gun was there mostly for show. These two brushes with crime allow me to understand the paranoia that motivates people to seek self-defense options like concealed carry. Up until the last year, I’ve been an avid proponent of the right to keep and bear arms but always with the caveat that I think gun owners should be required to submit to background checks no matter where the gun was purchased and that training should be mandatory.

You know, sane regulation of deadly weapons. The kinds of things that “gun rights” advocates are now calling tyranny and government overreach.

Let’s get something straight right now. A gun is simply a tool. Gun rights advocates will often spout the adage that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Ok, with that in mind and with the definition that a gun is simply a tool, let’s flip that adage a bit. “Hammers don’t hammer nails, people hammer nails.” This is as true as the statement about guns and killing people. It’s logically consistent and makes sense. It also means fuckall to the debate about controlling guns.

See, a hammer is a tool built for hammering nails. It’s very good at that task but it can’t hammer a nail without something or someone to make it hammer the nail. A person can hammer a nail without a hammer, this is very true. They would be very bad at doing so without a hammer, and they might have to resort to a different tool to get the job done, but it could be done. A hammer is just a more efficient, one might probably say the best tool for hammering nails. And that’s what the gun is to gun violence.

A gun is a tool built for one simple purpose – propelling bullets at things at a very high rate of speed so as to inflict damage upon it. It is a force multiplier in military terms. Inflicting damage upon another person is what it is best at. It could hammer a nail but that’s not what it was built for and using it for such could likely be dangerous. Is it the only tool that can kill people or inflict major bodily damage on another person? Well, no. If one wanted to inflict damage, one could stab someone with a knife, bash their head in with a hammer, or a baseball bat or a car or even a frozen fish. The key difference is that the gun is so specifically created to do the damage inflicting bit that it does it so much more efficiently than all the other methods. It is so efficient, one gun can kill multiple people within a short span of time than anyone else. A well-trained gunman can kill lots of people with less chance that his victims can fight back than the same guy with a knife or a bat or a hammer.

When gun rights advocates start saying things like “guns don’t kill people” and “if you outlaw guns, people will just choose a knife” to deter the talk from their guns to other non-starters. Yes, a killer without access to a gun will choose a different weapon like a knife. I chalk that up as a positive for gun control because that same killer is going to have a lot harder time killing the same numbers of people with a knife as he would with a gun. The Sandy Hook shooter might only have killed five or six as opposed to 26 with a knife. With a lower-capacity weapon like a double-barrelled shotgun, he might have only killed 10 as opposed to 26. Controlling gun violence by reducing the amount of guns is not meant to suddenly override the basic human instinct towards violence. It won’t stop violent people determined to inflict violence on others from doing so and anyone who thinks it would is living in a fantasy world. Gun control is about reducing the number of deaths and wounds from guns, not doing something impossible like removing them from existence for ever and ever. People will kill people. I want to make it harder for that to happen.

Another great argument against gun control is “if you outlaw guns, only criminals will have guns.” You might think this is an argument against gun control but it actually sounds like a positive result of sane laws. If only criminals have the guns, it makes it pretty simple to figure out who is a criminal. That sounds like a net gain in law enforcement efficiency to me, a simple if > then statement in programming terms. If the perp has a gun, the perp is a criminal. Arrest him, take his gun and suddenly there’s one less gun and one less criminal on the streets.

One of my favorite gun rights arguments against gun control is the frankly batshit crazy theory that the Constitution outlined the right to bear arms so that citizens could use those weapons to overthrow an oppressive government. First, that’s been tried before and it didn’t work then. We call it THE CIVIL WAR and it was a bloody mess. It also crystallized the legal precedent that you can’t legally rebel against the United States Federal Government. Had the Confederacy won, perhaps that would be legal, but they didn’t and so it’s not. Rebellion against the American government is called treason, it’s a crime and those who attempt it don’t end up well. Just for shits and giggles, let’s say that it was somehow legal to rebel against the government. Do the gun fetishists who claim that “they can take my guns from my cold dead hands” truly believe that their stockpile of assault weapons is going to allow them to not only survive against but overthrow an oppressive United States government? Even if the conflict escalated beyond ATF agents and into the National Guard being called against the rebels, do these people really think AR-15’s and Glocks are going to do much against a force that can wield tanks, drones, bombers, fighter jets, attack helicopters and so on? Have they not seen what happened to insurgent rebels in Afghanistan or Iraq? See how well those insurgencies did? That’s you, Ted Nugent, if you decide you want to rebel against the government. Go ahead and try it. At least we wouldn’t have to listen to your moonbat whingdings on television anymore.

The simple truth is that gun ownership has been elevated from a sensible though likely unnecessary ownership of the means of self-protection into this higher calling from God. Americans have a fetish with guns. Many of the most fervent gun rights supporters picture themselves as Bruce Willis in Die Hard, fighting off terrorists single-handed when the truth is nowhere close to that. Laws like Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws make prosecution of gun crimes almost impossible and sets up a false bravado in the minds of gun owners which pushes them towards pulling the trigger instead of exercising caution. This country had its days of unfettered access to and use of firearms, the Wild West. It’s not wild anymore for a reason. The reason is that people like going to a bar without the fear they’ll get into a gun fight.

I’ve gone from advocating cautious, sensible gun control to wanting an outright ban on most if not all firearms. The cost does not outweigh the benefit. 20 dead elementary school kids is not worth it for scared people to feel a little more macho. The killer at Sandy Hook did not own the weapons he used, but the weapons he used were legally obtained and stolen. You can’t prevent him getting those weapons with sensible gun control, only with complete gun removal. If it’s harder for him to get a weapon, maybe that gives us all time to help the clearly deranged kid before he does something violent. Maybe he even decides killing 20 kids is not a good use of his time. How many deaths would there be a year from guns if guns were extremely hard to get (a la Britain)? Statistics say that the different is 11,000 to 37. That could change our death rate from 30 per day to 1 every 10 days or so. I think that’s a pretty appreciable difference and it’s worth doing.

Notice I didn’t get into the whole issue of mental health in this country. That’s another issue we certainly have to address in this country, both from a social stigma and treatment standpoint. We do a horrible job with mental health. We need to address that.

However, if mentally damaged individuals weren’t able to get access to guns at every Wal-Mart and pawnshop in the country, they might be a lot less dangerous.

Certainly, there’s a middle ground between a complete ban as I advocate and total fucking anarchy. There always is. I’m willing to listen to that argument. What I’m not willing to listen to is jacked-up gun fetishists and the head of the NRA telling me gun control is a government intrusion on freedom. The NRA can go fuck itself. It has become nothing more than the mouthpiece for gun manufacturers who are making a literal killing in gun sales now that gun control is on the political agenda. It doesn’t represent gun owners, it represents the guys who want to exploit the fears of gun owners to sell more guns and ammo.

So let’s talk sane gun control without the moonbats and industry shills shitting up the conversation. 11,000 people will thank us eventually.

March 8, 2013 at 5:05 pm | Politics | No comment

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