I don't know about you, but I've known several people who've attempted suicide. Thankfully, most of them are still alive. Except the ones who used guns. I don't think the ones who used guns were any more hell-bent on death than the others, they just had a more efficient tool.
I won't have guns in the house. I ask the parents of their friends whether they own guns. If they do, the kids don't play at their houses. Sorry. You might think I'm being overly alarmist. You're right. Nothing bad would probably ever happen. Statistically.
Jane Smiley wrote a wonderful essay in the Huffington Post about attitudes towards handgun violence. She's much more eloquent than I could ever hope to be. But she's paid to be eloquent. I'll quote from it, here:
Here's what I think about guns--guns have no other purpose than killing someone or something. All the other murder weapons Americans use, from automobiles to blunt objects, exist for another purpose and sometimes are used to kill. But guns are manufactured and bought to kill. They invite their owners to think about killing, to practice killing, and, eventually, to kill, if not other people, then animals. They are objects of temptation, and every so often, someone comes along who cannot resist the temptation--someone who would not have murdered, or murdered so many, if he did not have a gun, if he were reduced to a knife or a bludgeon or his own strength. I wish that the right wing would admit that, while people kill people and even an "automatic" weapon needs a shooter, people with guns kill more people than people without guns do.
A few hundred people wrote comments in response to her essay. Pretty much writing what you'd expect. But it got me curious about something. How many firearm-related deaths happen in the home each year? Domestic arguments. Children getting their hands on guns. Suicides.
If you factor out the homicides that can be linked to criminal activity (gang-related), and factor out the unlicensed firearms that go along with that, how many firearm deaths are linked to licensed versus unlicensed firearms.
The 2nd Amendment cliche that "if you take guns away, only criminals will have guns." is fatuous. I'm not worried about criminals. I can safely avoid criminals. I'm much more worried about my neighbors shrieking at each other every night.
7 comments:
I totally agree with you - every last word.
My wife and I hadn't thought much about gun ownership in Canada, but I think that when we move there we'll be just as cautious with our children's friends as well. I jokingly say sometimes that I'm buying a gun when we get there, but honestly I wouldn't ever have one in the house. All my American friends live in gun free households.
Oh, and when that hill billy Flounder posts on Ubermilf's blog I can barely contain myself from flaming him back to the stoneage. What... a... dick!
Oh, and I keep hearing the "fact" that gun crime is really bad in England even though gun ownership is illegal.
If anyone tells you that, it's complete and utter rubbish. There are less than 200 gun deaths in the UK per year and we have a population of just over 60 million people. That is one quarter(ish) the population of the US. Even if it is one fifth of the poplation of the US that scales up to 1,000 gun deaths per 300 million, not the 12,000 that occur every year in the US. It just shows you that by banning gun ownership you reduce the number of deaths from guns by 12x !!
In 1996 a nutter walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland with two 9 mm Browning HP pistols and two Smith and Wesson .357 revolvers and murdered 16 children and a teacher. After that incident gun laws were tightened drastically. Guess what? It hasn't happened again, nothing even remotely like it.
Later a man attacked children in a primary school with a machete and their teacher defended them. Although 7 people were cut (some very badly) no one died.
If he'd had a gun at least 7 would have died, but instead no one did. It's as simple as that.
I went to high school with a boy who shot himself with his own rifle. They called it a hunting accident.
Seemed everyone I knew in Alabama owned a gun.
I agree about never letting kids over to a house that has guns. It never really became a question for our parents until we moved to the states but they sure did ask and were always met with strange looks.
bob I'm with you, Flounder's comment made me want to vomit.
I don't feel really strongly about gun control one way or another. As a mild observation, I see a cross section of the ole general public in town on a Saturday night and I'm glad they aren't packing heat.
That said... both sides of the gun control debate are guilty of giving examples of how they think things should be and applying it to this latest incident (whether that be if nobody had guns he couldn'a dunnit - or if the pupils were holding they'd have dropped him).
This happens every time there's a hot-topic incident and it's completely nuts.
Do we really want a debate to be framed, or god forbid, laws written on the basis of these incredibly unlikely tragic events?
Chris - I get what you're saying. And I wasn't directly referring to the Virginia incident (though Smiley was).
But I'd like to repeat a conversation I had with a neighbor yesterday (both of us reading the newspaper while riding the train):
Him: If only the students or faculty had guns, they could've defended themselves.
Me: If only they hadn't sold guns to a nutbag with a history of deranged behavior, they wouldn't have needed to defend themselves.
I'm getting the feeling that just as the gun control advocates on the Left are (definitely) trying to use this incident to spark a dialog -- the pro-gun Right is being very true to their talking points, saying "This is not the time to discuss guns, and anyone who does is politicizing the story."
That's politics, too. The politics of inaction.
This blog delights me no end. Thank you, Sysm, baby.
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