Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.
Adam Gopnik on Virginia Tech and gun control. Read it.
6 thoughts on “Time to amend the second amendment”
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While I agree that assault weapons and handguns have a single purpose – to take a human life – I think it’s too late to do anything substantive.
There are so many guns in circulation – and so much ammunition and the ability to reload it – that I think it’s pointless to talk about taking people killers out of circulation: it simply ain’t gonna happen.
We live in a nation with the most extensive set of laws ever devised, and look at the venal apparatchnik running the DOJ, and look at the criminals running the country. So, I don’t think outlawing guns is the answer, any more than raising the drinking age stops teenagers from drinking.
However, if the NRA had a shred of decency – and I don’t think they do, but for the sake of argument, let’s follow this – they would have gun safety classes in every elementary, middle, and high school, school systems would make them compulsory, and we could at least have a proactive approach to the problem.
There’s a lot of fear involved in the arguments for gun control, and I think if nothing else, at least exposure to these vile machines would take away some of the mystery. I mean, more people are killed in auto accidents, and we have driver’s ed, right?
Interesting point Richard. Just for comparison, in 2004, 29,569 people in the United States were killed by firearms — 11,624 (39%) were murdered, 16,750 (57%) were suicides, 649 (2.2%) were accidents, and in 235 cases (.8%) the intent was not established. 42,636 people were killed in auto accidents in 2004.
Sobering, and disturbing that the bulk were suicides.
Okay, so let’s say we add an amendment and outlaw everything except single-shot rifles and shotguns (and ignore all the people who start prattling about how the Nazis outlawed guns too, and get past the state’s rights arguments and all the other roadblocks people can throw up).
How do we enforce this amendment? It’s not practical (or legal) to break into everyone’s home looking for weapons, so do we require people to turn their weapons in? You’ll get all the registered weapons, but there are lots of unregistered weapons out there (I think; I don’t have hard data on this, so I may be wrong).
Do we offer to buy weapons? You’ll get some more weapons this way, but that also means the ones being hoarded become even more valuable.
Do we ask people to turn in their neighbors? Well, maybe that’s not such a bad idea: it’s time people got to know their neighbors a little better.
What about all the gun dealers, though? And what about the manufacturers, most of whom also make weapons for the military?
It seems enforcement would be exceedingly difficult, and that’s why I don’t think legal controls are sufficient. Necessary, perhaps, if only to codify our best beliefs, but not sufficient.
So, maybe we just have to accept that guns are part of our lives and engage this fact in some meaningful fashion. We tried pretending that alcohol could be banned, and we’re currently pretending that drugs can be controlled and that teenagers can abstain, and none of these efforts are particularly successful. If you keep trying the same thing and expecting different results, isn’t that one definition of insanity?
I’m certainly not opposed to more training, though schools spend enough time on non-academic stuff as it is, but that’s another subject.
What troubles me is, as Gopnik writes, there will always be psychotic killers in our midst. We have to control the access these people have to automatic weapons (and Ryder trucks and nuclear warheads). Other societies do it. How will we do it?
While the UK may have had some success at controlling guns, I’m reluctant to draw a causal link between better gun control and the absence of shooting rampages. The rampages are such rare events that it might be hard to prove statistically that you’ve actually made everyone safer. I think of it as the TSA effect. 😉
Besides, improved gun control in the UK didn’t do much to prevent the 7/7 bombings, did it? It’s not just guns you have to worry about; it’s people.
At the root of all this, though, I think you have a cultural problem and plain old addiction to power. Guns and independence and the frontier are all combined in our national mythos, and just like free speech means you have to suffer all sorts of nonsense – even someone blathering in a blog comment like me 😉 – the creation story of this country means you have to suffer horrors like Virginia Tech. Until most everyone’s willing to re-examine things, at least.
Me, I don’t own a gun, I have no desire to, and I would love to see a world without them. I also take every opportunity to tell my children how dangerous they are and to stay away from them because I’m worried about these idiots who have guns in their house “for protection” and didn’t spend the extra $20 for a trigger lock.
However, when my son turns 12 in a couple of years (maybe earlier), I’ll take him to a gun safety course and then to a shooting range, and I’ll do the same with my daughter when she’s old enough.
As for dealing with the disturbed among us, maybe we have to surrender some privacy in the form of medical records.
No easy answers, and I’ll get off the soapbox now; thanks. 🙂
So long as we can live with the fact that the number of children killed by guns in the U.S. every year is more than the rest of the industrialized world combined.
Oh, and women living with a gun in the home are three times more likely to be killed than women living with no gun in the home — which may say as much about gun owners as it does about proximity.