To bounce off my previous post that linked Roger Ebert's column after the shooting in Colorado ("The Body Count"), one of Clarence Page's recent op-ed columns discusses the options we might have to revise gun laws. If you're interested, here's "My Quest for Commonsense Gun Laws."
Below is the video of al-Qaida spokesperson/recruiter Adam Gadahn that Page mentions at the end of his article.
For a less scary set of points about gun laws and gun control, one that comes from an unlikely source, is "The 4 Most Meaningless Arguments Against Gun Control" on Cracked.
To take Cracked's lead, we might be able to boil it all down to a concise and snarky maxim that is a tweet from the comedian Rob Delaney: "Guns don't kill people. People who say 'Guns don't kill people' kill people. With guns."
5 comments:
The problem with gun control laws is simple:
Gun crimes are committed by people that don't follow the law.
It is impossible to eliminate guns from society, therefore, I don't want to disarm law-abiding citizens when the criminals aren't being disarmed.
I don't want to take away certain guns (such as guns for hunting animals other than humans) from people. But we do have police forces and the military for protection.
That someone can buy a weapon at a gun show without a background check is CRAZY. Just flippin' nuts. Seriously improving background checks and considering a ban on assault weapons (like Romney signed in MA in 2004) is warranted.
I'm actually fairly neutral on this subject, for various reasons, but I'll say that I'm rather surprised Cracked didn't add "Gun laws don't work because criminals don't obey the law" to their otherwise excellent list.
How do you know before a crime is committed that a person is going to be a criminal? It has been argued that guns create killers who otherwise wouldn't kill, because it's so much easier to kill with a gun than almost anything else. A child can kill with a gun -- children do kill with guns, in fact, every year, whereas I'd be willing to bet very few children or even adults kill with knives.
Moreover, the argument "Why should we create laws when they only restrict the law-abiding and do nothing about preventing crime" is faulty in other ways. The reason to create laws isn't just crime prevention. Tougher drunk driving laws may or may not have cut down on drunk driving homicides, but they have definitely resulted in more convictions and longer prison sentences for these crimes. What's more, drunk driving is just plain dangerous, unjustifiably so (no one really benefits from it), and as such there should be laws against it, one could argue, regardless of whether people choose to follow these laws.
As the author of the Cracked article points out, none of this necessarily means we should have tougher gun control laws; it just the standard responses those against tougher gun laws most often give are very weak.
All of that I wrote above is just an unnecessarily wordy way of saying ALL crimes are committed by people who don't follow the law, not just gun crimes. That alone is not a good enough reason to not have laws.
Thanks for chiming in, Babe. With guns.
Yes, guns certainly make killing/murder more efficient and easier. With handguns in particular, having them might give owners a false sense of security. As Babe notes and as many gun control advocates will show via stats, often handguns, on the whole, do more harm than good if you look big picture -- "crimes of passion," unbalanced people shooting up their places of work, kids killing themselves playing with their parents' guns. You get the idea.
Sure, someone could use a shotgun (gun for hunting game) in a place of work, but it's certainly going to take longer to reload.
I find it hard to believe that people need or should have a bevy of assault rifles at home since those guns are meant for killing people, not game. The talk show hosts can blather on all they want about people trying to make the US more socialist or liberal/Eurocentric or whatever is the scare tactic at the moment, but I think it's worth the time to see how other countries gun laws work or don't work.
I'd like to hear/read the reasoning behind why there are not background checks at gun shows other than politicians sucking on the money teats of the NRA. In addition, what appears to be the reluctance of the Obama administration to support a proposal limiting ammo sales also implicates how they aren't going to risk losing swing voters because some people want to buy lots of ammo over the Internet.
Give me the Web browser and pass the ammunition.
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