Strange Country

It is a strange country in which the rights of children to attend school in safety are less important than the right of adults to prepare to foment a new civil war.

From Facebook

• There is a big difference between having a gun and driving a car. To drive a car I must partition the government, take a written test and a skills test. If I pass both the government allows me the privilege to drive. Owning a gun is a right everyone who is born in the U.S. has. The government must show cause as to why someone shouldn't have a gun. Remember this is a right, like freedom of speech, freedom of worship, etc. All freedoms come with regulations. The facts do not point out that gun control works. D.C. enacted the tightest gun control laws in all of the U.S. in 1976. ALL guns must be registered, no new hand guns, EACH guns must be either dis-assembled or locked. Yet the murder rate went up 300%. The Supreme Court struck down the law and the murder rate is down 80%. Seattle has more guns and less murder than D.C. California now has the toughest laws in the Union but the highest murder rate. A study by Harvard indicates that gun laws show no relation to murder rates.

  Yesterday at 1:44pm · Like · 2
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  Glynn Currie You are right. I agree. I know "the right to bear arms" is ensconced in the constitution. I have never argued against that. But there is a problem in the U S that Americans seem unwilling to deal with. Every year 30 000 people die from a firearm related incident. When foreigners killed 3000 people in an attack on the World Trade Center, Americans acted with determination to prevent it from ever happening again. In the process they gave up many rights on order to feel safe again. What I have argued is that Americans (not Canadians despite my interest) need to confront that situation with a realistic plan to drastically decrease that number. I would most like to debate the merits of such a plan.

Are Gun Owners Well Trained

It has been asserted that gun owners are well trained. The commenter asserted that he would prefer to be in a crowded theatre where several gun owners would be firing back at a mass murderer than in a theatre where the mass murderer was the only person with a gun.

At first glance that seems like a reasonable argument. If a good guy with a gun could shoot the murderer he would likely save many lives. That is one possibility. If that good guy was well trained and in a location that allowed a direct shot at the murderer many lives could be saved. It draws to mind a scene from many movies where the good guy arrives just in the nick of time and saves the day.

However, movies are seldom reflected in real life. My fear is that it would be more likely that several good guys in different parts of the theatre would start shooting back, many of them unable to hit the broad side of the proverbial barn door. So many bullets would be unleashed in that confined space that more damage would be created by the good guys than by the bad guy. That, in fact, seems more likely than the former hypothesis.

The commenter asserted that most gun owners are well trained, thus making my hypothesis unlikely. I frankly doubt it. Some gun owners are well trained; in fact I will agree that many gun owners are likely well trained. But most: unlikely. The question is, trained in what? Trained in the laws surrounding gun ownership? Trained in the safe handling of guns? Trained in marksmanship? All of these are important lessons that gun owners should have training in, but trained in shooting in a volatile situation where lives are dependent on their training. That seems extremely unlikely.

How do we know if gun owners are trained at all, let alone well trained? In a country where anyone with a credit card can walk into a store, purchase a weapon and walk away without any oversight, even a background check, why would we expect that person was likely to take a training course, either before or after he makes the purchase.  It seems unlikely that anyone who is concerned about having a background check is likely to take the trouble to take a gun course.

What does well trained mean? There are many excellent gun handling courses available to US citizens. The NRA offers one with which I am familiar. Various wild life associations have others; so courses are available. I am sure the various militias that run around playing soldier offer training as well. Having said that, there are no standards against which those training courses can be measured. How can we tell if they are good? How can we tell if their graduates are well trained? Some sort of national standards are required against which the quality of these courses and their graduates can be measured. One of the great advantages of gun control legislation is that the nation would be gathering together to discuss these important issues and establishing the type of training shooters would require in order to consider themselves well trained.

Well-crafted gun legislation would help everyone to know what is acceptable gun behaviour and what is unacceptable. Such clear cut guidelines would inform the good guys of what they should be doing and inform the police about which people are not using their weapons in a socially acceptable way so that action could be taken. Without such legally binding guidelines, no one, whether good guy or bad guy, is clear about what he should or should not do with his firearms. We should not be surprised then when someone uses his weapon in an irresponsible way.

It would be great if the gun lobby were able to participate in this type of discussion about the obligations of gun owners, so the rest of the nation could learn about their legitimate concerns and make use of their expertise to craft legislation that would increase the safety of US citizens. Such a role would be a much better use of their unique perspective than the role of stubborn mule which they are currently playing.

Bad Guys Don't Obey Gun Laws

Another argument against gun control is that bad guys don’t obey the law anyway, so why do we make things more difficult for law abiding citizens? Of course, on closer examination that argument doesn't really hold up.

Consider what would happen if we used the same argument against other areas of life. If we said that speeding laws are broken so we should do away with all speeding laws; if we said that banks are still robbed so we should do away with laws against robbing banks; if we said that murders still happen so we should do away with homicide laws.

Without laws, we don’t have lawbreakers. How do we distinguish between good guys and bad guys when there are no laws to be broken? If anyone can purchase a killing machine, transport it openly, carry it into a public meeting place and not do anything wrong, he cannot be stopped by the police until he actually takes it out and shoots someone. Up to that point he has done nothing wrong. Even if the police have reasons to suspect what he is up to they can do nothing because they will be violating those same civil rights that gun enthusiasts are arguing need to be protected. We need laws so the society through the police can differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable gun behaviour.

Laws define the values of a society. A society that believes that people’s lives are important and that people should be able to move around their society freely and in safety pass laws that make that possible. A society that sees danger around every corner and arms its citizens accordingly will build in its own dangers and remove freedom of movement from its citizens. Americans have to look more critically at their values and how those values are reflected in the laws of their country. In the end, it will not be outsiders who make the changes required to make people feel safe, it will be Americans themselves, through their political system.

The libertarian principle that “one man’s freedom to swing his fist, ends where another man’s nose begins” prompts us to examine how the freedom of one person to own and/or carry a killing machine should end, when it takes away from another person’s right to move freely through his community without fear. Laws can be used by a society to mediate between these freedoms in order to provide the most good for the most people.

Gun controls are merely a set of laws that tell citizens how society thinks guns should be used. It provides a set of rules by which gun owners know what they can and cannot do. Properly established they should arise form a discussion between gun owners and the rest of society, however, that would require a sense of compromise from those gun owners that seems unlikely to exist today. 

Common Gun Sense

I encourage you to check this blog. The writer has some interesting ideas and a great writing style. She also has many links to other websites with information about the gun issues.
http://www.commongunsense.com/

Is Gun Contol Like the Rules of the Road

Supporters of the gun lobby have argued that despite controls automobiles kill thousands of people every year; and if this is true, why don’t I argue for a ban on automobiles in order to save lives? They see this as a valid comparison to arguing for gun control because so many people die from the use of guns.

Of course this argument fails on a number of fronts so let’s examine some of them.

First I have not argued for the banishment of guns. Such an argument turns the gun control debate into a black and white issue that pushes many citizens into the pro gun camp, even though they see problems with the current system. This preference for a black and white issue is a classic argument used by the gun lobby to prevent debate from happening on a more meaningful agenda. In fact the logical conclusion that flows from the premise that the “right to bear arms” means that “any person can carry any weapon at any time” is that it is OK for a person released from a mental institution to drive down town, purchase a howitzer, hook it to the back of his pickup truck and drive down the highway. Does anyone truly believe this? If not, that person believes in some sort of gun control, the question being what kind of controls.

So, almost all of us believe in some sort of gun control. The issue then is what sort of controls makes sense. The debate on gun control would be better placed looking at areas of common concern and how they can be addressed than to argue there should not be any controls on guns. I suppose this could be construed as compromise, if that is not a dirty word on the current US political scene.

In fact I suggest the gun lobby is going to set the conditions for a ban on guns if it continues its black and white argument. As public opinion swells against the senseless deaths that occur every day because of guns and sees no hope of compromise there will be a wave of revulsion against the gun lobby which will swing the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that very restrictive controls will become acceptable.

Second, automobiles are not like guns. They have many useful peaceful purposes. They have made our lives easier in so many ways that banning automobiles would have a net negative effect. Even opponents of gun control would oppose the banishment of automobiles. Guns have only one purpose, to kill, while automobiles primarily serve a beneficial purpose and death is a side effect. Used as an ambulance automobiles actually save lives.

Still, death is a pretty significant side effect of owning an automobile. Automobile makers and government agencies take the issue of automobile safety seriously. They are constantly developing new safety systems and regulations with a lowering of deaths as a primary purpose. On the other hand gun makers use their advertising and lobbying efforts to prevent any action being taken to decrease the killing effect of their product. A recent example is the lobbying that is currently taking place to promote the legalization of silencers as a way to increase their sales figures. One can only imagine how the use of a silencer will lead to increasing firearms safety!

It is true that many people die every day due to the improper use of the automobile. But consider what it would be like if the gun lobby’s model were to be placed on the automobile.

There would be no drivers’ licences.  As a result there would be no minimum age restrictions for drivers and no minimum skill level required. Automobile manufacturers would build pink cars for little girls and 8 year olds would drive around the trailer park.  Anybody who wanted to drive would be allowed to walk down to a local dealership, pay for a car and drive home. No insurance would be required, so accident victims would not be guaranteed compensation for their losses and injuries. On the highway there would be no regulations, no speed limits, no lane assignments. There would be no licences on cars and therefore no way for police to identify a particular vehicle and the owner attached to it.

And the National Automobile Association would argue, “Cars don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Why is it that we regulate almost anything that we perceive to be dangerous: automobiles, airplanes, building codes, even licencing dogs and enforcing muzzle laws, yet killing machines are not regulated in any meaningful way.

And please don’t tell me that there are regulations in cities such as Chicago or Washington, or states such as Connecticut or Colorado. For no matter how important these first baby steps might be, they are isolated and therefore ineffective by themselves. And if you truly support the concept that there should be no regulations, you would also admit that you don’t want these limited regulations anyway.

So do we want to see a positive social machine banned from the country; do we want to see the automobile freed from its current restrictions to become like the firearms industry. Or do we want to see a middle ground where firearms are regulated in a manner similar to the automobile in order to reduce the number of deaths they cause. The choice seems clear to an outsider. I can only wonder why it is not clear to those caught in the middle of this ongoing tragedy.

Children and Guns

This is an article well worth reading for anyone who is interested in the subject of gun control:

              http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/gun-deaths-children-newtown-caroline-sparks-crickett-firearms?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+motherjones%2Fmain+%28MotherJones.com+Main+Article+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+International