A Comment on Gun Control
There are some
issues that seem to be going unanswered or at least unadvertised in the hot and
heavy debate about gun control. First, I ask the reader to take a short test.
1.
If
you have a 10 dollar allowance and you go to your parents and ask for a raise
to 12 dollars and your mom says yes, but your dad says that he will give you 11
dollars, do you believe your dad wants to cut your allowance in half?
2.
If
10 people have something and 2 more want to have the same thing and you prevent
these 2 from getting what they want, do you believe you have reduced the overall
number of the object desired?
3.
If a
person commits a crime and you cannot punish that person, should you punish
someone else who is not guilty to make a point?
4.
If
you want to do something that you believe is right, but it is illegal to do so,
and doing so has been shown to contribute no positive benefit, should you do it
anyway so at least you can say you did something?
5.
Do
you believe that you should eliminate temptation indulged by a very few, even
though the vast majority do not give into that temptation?
6.
Do
you believe that after the 2nd amendment was passed, Thomas
Jefferson got in his buggy to go tell George Washington that from now on he
would have to register his long guns and could not even own a pistol?
I would like to
make a few points to those who say yes to even one of these questions.
1.
There
are approximately 300 million guns in America.
Stopping future purchases will not actually decrease that number.
2.
Teaching
people that there are negative consequences to their bad behavior is a good
social function. Teaching people that
they will be punished when someone else does something bad is a very dangerous
social function.
3.
Focusing
on the inanimate object associated with a crime is not going to be as effective
as focusing on the person and their violent behavior. We do not ban hammers or baseball bats, or
knives or cars even though examples of terrible killing using these objects are
easy to find.
4.
There
are many instances where a weapon has prevented a rape, beating or other crime,
but since the prevention itself does not usually get publicly counted, one is
lead to believe, falsely, that only the gun related crimes are occurring in
society.
5.
Banning
the fork to eliminate over weight or banning cars because there are people who
drive drunk, or more serious observations such as the idea that guns don’t
kill, people kill, or that the only thing that is going to stop a bad person
with a gun is a good person with a gun can be dismissed as silly, simple
minded, just a joke or worse. But that
is a pejorative response and not a thoughtful argument. The observation that
protecting kids in school necessitates having someone with a gun and
appropriate training within the immediate area demonstrated a desire to protect
children and the broader society.
6.
Only
criminals will still have guns as the honest and compliant people are forced to
give up theirs. People living in a violent neighborhood, unable to defend
themselves, has not worked very well in our cities.
7.
We
could identify and help people with emotional issues that have demonstrably
rendered them much more likely to commit violence. We do not even deal effectively with violent students
who are repeat offenders that attack other students and even attack their teachers.
A simple
solution such as banning weapons is not going to take weapons out of the hands
of those who use them to do harm but it will prevent people from defending
themselves. Instituting a mental health
system that participates in early identification and consequential treatment is
something we could do, but so far, we have not.
We are
polarizing society when we target with punitive action a group that has done
nothing wrong. When politicians impose rules that are plainly forbidden by the
founding principals of our country, they run a risk of creating a much more negative
situation than the one they are pretending to solve.
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