Guns
July 20, 2012 14 Comments
One of the most surreal things of today is just scrolling through my FB feed and seeing links to story after story about the horrible murders in Colorado (Adam Gopnik: “it dignifies them to call them a ‘tragedy’”) while there’s other posts about kids earning blue belts, boycotting Chik-Fil-A for lunch, and dogs sleeping in laundry baskets (I don’t begrudge these standard posts the tiniest bit, it’s just a very surreal juxtaposition of horror a mundane existence). I’ve already read a fair amount of commentary on the Colorado shootings and so far I really love Adam Gopnik’s which really just comes out and calls our gun culture to task:
The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?
But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed…
Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? [emphasis mine]
Also, a nice post from Weigel on the politics. I don’t hold out much hope for any of this changing in my lifetime or the next. Guns are such an ingrained part of America’s culture. And short of a genuine changing of our culture anything we do policy-wise is likely only playing at the margins. And more innocent people are going to die. And that’s a damn shame.
About Steve Greene
Yes and the answer is easier regs for concealed carry. Imagine if someone had a concealed weapon once the shooting started, he could have saved lives by shooting the shooter.
I’ll go with this response via a stranger on Dahlia Lithwick’s FB page: ” They’re [NRA] saying that if the people in the theater had been armed they could have stopped this, because apparently they think that firing handguns in a dark and chaotic theater at a psychopath wearing body armor would save more lives than not giving the psychopath a gun in the first place.”
I don’t think current procedures were “giving the psychopath a gun”. So far it looks the suspect was a college graduate and had no criminal record. Absent other information I can’t imagine why any current or proposed background/licensing process would have denied this guy from purchasing a gun.
Steve you are entitled to your opinion, but I will go with the idea that had there been a hero with a gun who shot the guy and put him down I don’t think anyone in that theatre would argue for gun control. I once heard the definition of a liberal is a guy who has not been mugged yet
I know plenty of liberals who have been mugged.
Guns kill very few people adult as child
the big killer but tobacco and its added
highly addictive chemicals ((tobacco))
kills in millions far more than any bullet.
It was predictable that the pro-NRA folks would argue that if other patrons had been armed that they would have shot the gunmen. Possibly, and at least in theory. But in reality, the gunmen was well-armed, had body armor, there was smoke, and people were screaming and running about. Just think about the likelihood of other outcomes: the “hero” shoots and fails to incapacitate the shooter — so the gunmen turns and blasts everyone in the area where our here is standing. Or, the hero shoots a an innocent bystander. Or multiple bystanders, and then gets shot himself. The idea that an armed do-gooder would respond like a Navy SEAL is ridiculous. I will concede that in these scenarios the gunmen would be unlikely to reload, assuming the hero hasn’t already been shot and killed.
I know that just about everyone in the upper plains county where I come from has multiple guns. And guess what — no murders, at least not since the 1950s. While I am in favor of banning certain types of ammunition, body armor, and weapons, I am under no delusion that criminals would stop trying to acquire guns or that gun crime would drop appreciably. The culprit isn’t the gun, it is the person who has already decided it is OK to kill someone. And more problematically (insofar as I see no way to fix this) is the subculture of honor/thuggery/hopelessness that believes every slight needs to be met with violence.
Hey Mike, precisely because it is dark a hero could quickly come to the area that the shooter is by hiding behind theatre seats and shoot him in the legs to take him down. But trained military are trained to shoot him 3 times center mass. Now that won’t kill him or even have the bullets penetrate but the force of the concussion will knock the guy down and stun him severely thus enabling the hero to get close enough to finish him with a killing head shot
Hey Mike
I was reminded of a guy who locked up doors from the outside of a club where his ex girlfriend was with her new boyfriend and the guy torched the place killing a bunch of people and the NRA sarcastically suggested banning all cigarette lighters.
There are a lot of ex military like me who know that even if the guy is wearing body armor, 3 shots center mass will put him down and incapacitate him long enough to do a killing head shot
Hey Mike and don’t forget that there is always an underground criminal element who will sell guns without any licensing. Gun control is a figment of the liberals imagincation and short of absolute dictatorship in this country, it will never happen so what is the alternative, I say loosen up the concealed carry laws which by the way don’t cause violence from law abiding citizens
“which by the way don’t cause violence from law abiding citizens”
That’s a tautology. As soon as a law-abiding citizen shoots someone illegally, that person becomes a non-law-abiding citizen.
Hey Itchy
Well here is a big DUH for you. I am not talking about a law abiding citizen killing someone illegally but in self defense which is legal everywhere
I have to point out that while Canada has enacted stringent gun laws, we just had a shooting in Toronto. 24 wounded. 2 dead. Shootings continue, regardless of strict gun laws, heavy penalties (even for Canada) and bans on all sorts of guns, including machine guns and small easily concealed pistols. BTW, machine guns are some of the simplest guns to build with relatively simple tools.
Almost all the recent shootings (since start of heavier restrictions) in Canada have been with illegal weapons smuggled in from the US. Very few have been because of legal gun owners.
Canada’s firearms deaths have remained steady because of the rise of gangs and organized criminal activity. Firearm deaths from your ‘local joe’ killing friends or family during arguments have dropped and we have seen an increase in drive by gang shootings and so called gangland executions.
I should also point out that increase in knife attacks has risen, in Canada, England and Australia.
Of course, it’s pretty darn hard to kill a room full of people with a knife, although I think at least one person tried in Australia. I don’t think that was well thought out. I doubt they ever really are.
And William Wallace, people choose to smoke, do drugs, drink, not wear seat belts, have unprotected sex with total strangers or drive motorcycles at extreme speeds. Anything you do to yourself is your problem and your choice, not mine. Even if you want to shoot yourself. That’s your decision, and as far as I am concerned, it’s your right to die in the fashion you choose, fast with a gun or slow with tobacco and alcohol or a fatty diet. Just as long as you don’t take anyone else with you.
Freedom means being able to choose how we live and perhaps, if we are lucky, how we die.
“Well here is a big DUH for you. I am not talking about a law abiding citizen killing someone illegally but in self defense which is legal everywhere”
I know you’re talking about that, but it doesn’t work; it’s still a tautology.
If loosening the concealed-carry laws result in more shootings, some of which are illegal, some of which are in self-defense, then, by definition, the ones that were illegal were committed by non-law-abiding citizens (regardless of whether they had heretofore been law-abiding) and the ones that were deemed to be in self-defense were not.
“Law-abiding” is defined post hoc, so saying they “don’t cause violence from law-abiding citizens” is meaningless.