A case in point. In his most current Monday Morning Quarterback article, he has this little throw-out near the end:
My heart goes out to the victims of the Fort Hood and Orlando shootings and their loved ones. Senseless, senseless incidents. I will not go quietly into the night on this one. America needs to do something about idiots with handguns. How many more Fort Hoods and Orlandos do there have to be before our political leaders have the guts to severely restrict access to murderous weapons?While I definitely agree with the sentiment he shows for the victims, the rest of that is, in essence, an anti-gun diatribe that has little to do with the facts. Because of this, I took the time to write him a response:
America has literally thousands of very restrictive gun laws on the books, that are specifically designed to keep guns of all sorts out of the hands of nut cases, criminals, and even average citizens. The problem is that those laws are not a high priority to enforce and there are a lot of loopholes. If our incredible police force had the manpower, which they simply don't, to allow them to put in the effort to enforce those laws, gun crimes would significantly drop.I simply do not understand why a large portion of the American public insists on blaming the weapon for the crime that was committed. I own guns. I know for an absolute fact from personal experience that you can leave a Government Model Colt .45 semi-automatic handgun cocked, locked, and loaded and nothing bad will happen for years on end unless someone/thing handles the gun. The only time, barring something being made improperly or broken, that a gun or ammunition will harm anyone is when someone or something intervenes on the weapon, handles it, and causes it to go off.
Secondly, the vast, vast majority of gun owners you never read about. The vast, vast majority follow the laws, don't use their weapons to commit crimes, and, for the most part, are law-abiding citizens. The majority of gun crimes are committed by criminals who a) can't legally procure a gun, so get it illegally and b) would commit the crime using something other than a gun anyway if a gun was not available to them. The only thing more gun laws do is make it harder for those who follow the law to get the gun of their choice. Not one of the thousands of laws on the books stops a criminal from illegally obtaining a weapon.
Lastly, far more violent crimes are committed by knives (kitchen, pocket, hunting, etc.), should we ban all knives? Far more violence is committed by those with blunt weapons (bats, chains, crowbars, rocks) than by knives or guns, should we ban everything blunt that could conceivably be used for violence? The problem is not the weapon of choice, it is the person who uses it. Never forget that.
These facts are easily found by even a cursory search online. While Fort Hood was a tragedy, it was the individual who decided to use the gun to shoot some 30+ people who should be blamed, nothing and no one else. It is his fault and he should pay for his decision to commit these acts of violence.
I was raised in a household with guns. At an early age, my father taught both his children to respect the tool that a gun is, to understand the consequences of using that tool, and showed us how to use it properly. We took gun safety courses. I have a gun license. My parents left a loaded gun in a drawer by the bed for home defense.
And nothing bad ever happened.
Nothing bad happened because my parents were educated in gun safety, rules, and etiquette, they educated their children, and we all respected that this tool had one purpose and was deadly efficient at performing that duty.
I got angry when I was a child. I had screaming arguments with my parents and sibling at times. I had huge arguments with friends/enemies who lived around me, or while at school, or on bus trips to other cities. And never once did it even dawn on me to grab my father's easily accessible, loaded weapon and shoot anyone. Instead, I worked out my problems with the person, or avoided them, or on very rare occasion got into fisticuffs with them. This is all because I was educated on the weapon and knew that it wasn't meant to be used in those cases; there were better solutions that didn't involve deadly force.
Some people are broken. Some are idiots. Some are amoral and just don't give a shit. Some are so depressed/angry/hurt they see no other solution but horrific violence (to themselves or others). These people will ALWAYS find some way to act out their need for violence regardless of whether they can get their hands on a gun. People have committed violence against themselves and others long before guns were created and will continue to do so long after guns become passe or something more lethal comes along.
The UK has some of the most restrictive gun laws of any industrial nation. On a per capita basis, you are about twice as likely to be the victim of a crime involving a knife in the UK as you are of a gun in the United States. This indicates that if guns were done away with as a whole, crime wouldn't go away, but criminals would use whatever other threatening weapon was available to them.
The biggest issues with guns are the combination of 1) impulse control in the human being with access to the gun and 2) the deadly efficiency of the tool. If you suddenly get the idea to do someone or yourself fatal harm using, say, a baseball bat, there is a lack of immediacy to the results; in nearly every case it takes multiple hits with the bat to kill someone, is bloody/messy, and the violence takes real effort to the one performing it. In most cases, the same is true with knives, rocks, and even overdoses-- each takes time and possible reapplication of the tool to get the result needed. They each take surprising effort to accomplish your goal.
Guns, on the other hand, are much better at being immediately fatal. If you fire a reasonably powered gun into someone else or yourself, especially in the upper chest or head, the chances of you or the person dying immediately or after one application is much higher than using most other forms of violence. There is no chance to "take it back" or "quit while you're ahead" or show remorse. And this is why the entire country has legally enforceable waiting periods between when you purchase a gun and when you can take possession of the gun. However, criminals don't get their guns from reputable gun dealers who abide by these laws. And those who are "in a fit of passion" or similar, will simply turn to the next most fatal object they can get their hands on in order to enact the violence they feel.
We have thousands of gun laws per state and for the entire nation. These laws spell out who can and can't have a gun. They spell out which types of guns are okay for citizens and which are not okay. They limit magazine size, where you can shoot, what you can shoot, when you can shoot. They even regulate when you can have, get, purchase, and possess your gun. There are state laws that say the same thing as federal laws.
The one thing that these laws do not seem to understand is the base truth that criminals don't follow these rules. Criminals do not go to the gun shop and legally purchase the gun (because they can't-- if they have a record, they will be caught on the background check and disallowed from the purchase). In general, the only people affected by gun laws are those who are following the gun laws already; who are, generally speaking, the people least likely to mishandle or misuse the weapon.
The violence committed with guns of all sorts is heinous. I do not dispute that. But let's never forget that it is the PERSON who uses the gun who is at fault. And it is against that person whom we should turn our anger, frustration, and hatred over the heinous act. The person should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Excellent blog on many levels!!
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