3 Thoughts on Gun Control
1. Most people with guns are good. Probably the most overlooked part of the debate. There is no evidence to suggest that gun ownership makes someone violent or more prone to using a gun. This is why gun advocates say things like, “guns don’t kill people”. They are afraid that the good people will lose their guns. But that still leaves us with the bad people, which leads into my next point.
2. Very few people need high powered rifles. A true ban of high-powered weapons would probably be a good thing. However, the logistics of a ban make it almost impossible. I’m not going to get into every detail, but this article explains why an assault weapons ban is almost impossible. The short version: either government has to ban almost every gun on the market (which no one but the extreme left would support) or they have to create meaningless bans that gun makers can easily get around (which no one should support but many will).
3. A hard look at the data suggests gun laws don’t reduce crime, but gun ownership does. Guns were created so that the 6 and a half foot, 300 pound men can’t walk into the house of the 4 foot nothing, 100 pound woman, rape her and take her stuff. They are the great equalizers. A knife can’t do that. Neither can words. Except for one, all mass shootings in recent history have happened in gun-free zones where the assailant knows he can make the biggest splash. In situations where an average citizen breaks the law and has a gun, these shootings are quickly cut short. Criminals aren’t stupid; they attack children because kids can’t defend themselves.
Conclusion
While there is some good to the idea of gun control, it’s a logistical nightmare for politicians, it doesn’t ultimately protect anyone, and the true data suggests that when more average, good citizens are armed, these tragedies don’t last as long and don’t harm nearly as many innocent.
These are my thoughts after listening to the two sides over the past few weeks and considering the realistic outcomes of either a gun ban or a return to the status quo. I do like the idea of having smaller clips, though I doubt that would make a significant difference in the tragedy in Connecticut where no one but the murderer was armed. I also like the idea of the average citizen being trained in the art of gun use, specifically cleaning, handling, and respecting guns. Could this help take off the stigma of guns or would it train up a generation of murderers I’m not sure, but I would like to continue to talk about the idea.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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I’ve been thoughtfully checking out mentally from the debate in light of the recent tragedy, because all I have been hearing from both sides are the same old bumper-sticker/facebook image talking points. I can’t really respond to all the stupid stuff being flung back and forth on my own, so it’s just been easier to keep mum about it, but it has prevented me from formulating my own thoughtful opinion on the matter.
My political views are ideally anarcho-libertarian, but practically on a spectrum lying somewhere between that and where our government/society are now. I believe that it is a right for anyone to own whatever they want just as long as it isn’t used to bring harm to another person. Some may say I’m being disingenuous to say that since guns are designed to bring harm to another person, but to say that ignores intent versus actual action. A car in the hands of a bad person can kill people; same with many things we are allowed to own.
But the flipside is this. Though it is inconsistent with the idealized views I have, I think that given that there are bad and crazy people out there, restricting the most dangerous amongst us from owning guns is probably a worthy goal. However it is never as simple as that, because much like with drugs and pirated media, simply outlawing it doesn’t make it go away. Thus like with drugs, I feel that instead of criminalizing ownership/use and coming down with a heavy hand,he government would be best to focus on seeking out and helping the people most at risk for harmful use and only when they act to harm someone else (or are at an imminent risk) should their freedoms be deprived.
P.S., statistics that cite other countries with stricter gun laws having lower gun violence are fallacious, since they don’t look at violence overall. Though I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, I bet attacks with knives and other weapons are more frequent per capita in Britain than here.
As always, I deeply appreciate your thoughts, Tim. I think this is the big question, “Most people are basically going to do the right thing, but what do we do about people who won’t?”
It’s a very difficult question to answer. Ultimately, dealing with those people either becomes something the government is heavily involved in (obliterating much of the constitution to accomplish this goal) or it becomes something the individual citizens band together and accomplish (more or less without the hand of government).
Alex Humphrey recently posted..3 Thoughts on Gun Control
One of the afternoon radio hosts on 105.3 has been vehemently arguing against gun ownership for about a month now, so I’ve been hearing a lot of this stuff.
What really bothers me about his argument is that he wants all the guns to just go away, as if there’s some magic switch that will uninvent something that was invented thousands of years ago.
It’s completely illogical and hardly anything resembling a solution.
Personally, I don’t want or need to own a gun at this point in my life. That being said, I don’t really think it’s my business to just demand that gun owners give up their guns.
I tend to fall in line with the thinking that, if you take them away from the good people, only the bad people will have them. There’s got to be a happy medium between nobody gets guns! and everybody gets guns!, though nobody seems particularly interested in finding it.
Mike Luna recently posted..The More Things Change, the More They Whatever
Very true. To create a true gun ban would require 100 years to complete (gathering all the guns, destroying them, etc). A solution, but is it realistic?
Alex Humphrey recently posted..3 Thoughts on Gun Control