Look there. Or, look farther --- way over there. But don't look here. It's never the gun.
It's the shooter, who is deranged, so we should address mental illness and cure it. It's a protest against religion because slaughters in church are anti-Christian. Or the gunman is anti-military or anti-schooling. It's the victim, who made himself or herself vulnerable. It's the lack of a Good Guy with a gun within shooting distance nearby. Guns are everywhere in society, one that loves seeing violence on the screen and wants to play games with it, so nothing about guns can effectively change that. Or, it's just an unfortunate
accident, ah
incident, er
mistake. And it is lax enforcement of existing gun laws which, it is also argued (in a separate conversation), are already so onerous they must be loopholed even more.
Speaking of the gun massacre in Chattanooga, GOP presidential spokeman Donald Trump declared, "This has nothing to do with guns." Bobby Jindal, Republican presidential hopeful whose state of Louisiana has led the nation in gun deaths over a ten-year period, calls these "things that never should have happened."
In the 30,000 cases a year of death and 85,000 non-fatal injuries by guns, according to the NRA and its handmaidens and apologizers, the fault never, ever, under any circumstances lies with a gun. The gun rights argument goes quite the other way: the only answer to gun violence is more guns, available everywhere and at the ready. That's gun proliferation writ large and bold, a mantra that is selling handguns in record numbers.
We are a nation awash in guns and gun violence. As one DK commenter put it, America has Gun Cancer.
Designed and used as directed, guns are inherently dangerous. That's the point of safety lessons and target practice discipline. Not even the NRA denies that.
Guns are designed to fire an object with explosive force for a considerable distance from the shooter. They extend and empower the shooter's reach. They are intuitively easy to use and require very little training and no skill. Compared to, say, a smart phone with a service contract, a handgun is not expensive. And firearms are very attractive. A four-year-old wants to pick one up and then aim at his baby brother in a crib. On Daily Kos, David Waldman is up to his 80th GunFAIL diary ... and counting.
In a country that aspires to be civilized, guns are readily available - deadly instruments without any substantial law enforcement surround to their acquisition and use in many states.
So, why is regulating firearms so hard?
Here are some of the usual arguments ...
- Guns don't kill people; people kill people.
Partly true. With guns, people can hurt and kill people - more, better, faster. Guns are an enabler, a creator and extender of power. People can very effectively unleash their aggressions with a small, readily concealable, immediately deployable handgun. Or a portable arsenal with mass-slaughtering power. Bottom line: violence by gun involves a person WITH A GUN.
- The Second Amendment protects having a gun.
Partly true. According to the Supreme Court, the Second Amendment protects the right to have a handgun in one's home for self-defense. But even that limited right is not absolute. In the seminal case of DC v. Heller, the Court held that it is subject to reasonable regulations. Some lower courts have extended this ruling (to public carry as a matter of right, for example) but despite many opportunities, the Supreme Court has chosen not to take cases that would extend the Heller doctrine (except to apply it to cities and states in McDonald v. City of Chicago.
- Arm people in churches, schools, malls.
As the Mayor of Charleston, Joseph Riley, said (in response to a proposal by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee):
"... I knew these people. They weren’t going to be carrying handguns. You want an 87-year old retired lady or you want a minister to be carrying a handgun or a 78-year old retired lady that used to work for the city of Charleston? That is so insane. ... We want everybody to carry a gun? And then you have everybody carrying a gun and then somebody gets upset and pulls it out because they got it handy and they got mad all of a sudden and rather than argue, or take a swing at somebody, they just kill them. It’s crazy, that is insane."
The latest locations for gun carry permissiveness? College campuses and - favored recently by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry - movie theaters. On
Meet the Press, Perry unloaded even more: "... these concepts of gun-free zones are a bad idea." What could possibly go wrong with allowing guns in areas that local authorities determined should be gun free?
- Gun deaths are not as common as [insert other means of inflicting death].
A gun is an effective killing instrument and prevention of gun deaths is a pretty important goal. We would know more if for 15 years, the gun industry's proxies in Congress hadn't blocked efforts to gather comprehensive statistics on gun deaths and to treat gun traumas as the public health issue that they are. The rationale for hiding such information? Irony alert! That knowing more about the use of guns might constitute advocacy against them, quite a cheer for uninformed policy making.
- We have plenty of laws on the books now. They just need to be enforced.
Gun violence could be more preventable if measures to do so weren't blocked by laws riddled with loopholes negotiated by the gun industry. The exceptions for gifts of guns, private sales and gun shows, for example, fill our gun laws with ways to evade them. By recent estimate, 40% of guns are sold to individuals who haven't had any background check. As for ATF enforcement, gun rights advocates have convinced Congress to beggar its budget and limit its personnel for years.
- We cannot have background checks or registration of guns and gun owners. It's a slippery slope. The government will be coming to get your gun!
Really? Polls show up to 90% of Americans favor background checks. We have databases of, say, cars and drivers, to be as sure as we can be that they are qualified and responsible, and remain so. If someone is DUI or a prolific accident-causer, their drivers license can be revoked. And when cars are transferred from one owner to another, the transaction is recorded.
Why should firearms be subject to any less regulation? If anything, accountability for such inherently dangerous instruments should be greater. Responsible gun enthusiasts - NRA members included - should have no problem complying with such laws.
- Universal registration and background checks would require a costly bureaucracy.
Probably not. The mechanisms can be computerized and many are already in place. Fewer gun slaughters - each fewer gun death - would be worth a great deal.
- We must have guns to fight tyranny, just like our Founding Fathers.
Really? If government wanted to come for people's guns, would having a lot of little guns realistically deter it? What do we expect - except for paranoia - from the civilian and state government "surveillance teams" monitoring the military's Jade Helm exercises in Texas?
- There's no room for Federal action. Firearms are a matter for state-by-state policy.
Gun rights advocates only selectively apply that notion. They've proposed to require every state to defer to the state with the most lax gun laws, for example. There is evidence that states with the highest gun ownership have the greatest numbers of gun deaths.
- If guns are made illegal, only criminals will have guns.
No proposal makes guns illegal. But still, it's a nice tautology there. Some criminals will have guns no matter what, but fewer certainly will if, for example, gun show sellers and buyers complied with the same laws as Federally licensed gun dealers. Buying in bulk with an ID, a nod and fistfuls of cash accounts for a large number of guns involved in street crimes.
- The answer to a Bad Guy with a gun is a Good Guy with a gun!
If someone starts shooting - on a street, for example, or in a crowded mall or a bar - who's the Good Guy, who's the Bad Guy? Those sharpshooter militia on deadbeat rancher Cliven Bundy's property aiming at law enforcement - were they Good Guys or Bad Guys? Or the self-appointed militiamen outside military recruiting offices, ostensibly to protect those inside. How does the public, law enforcement and the military (who's reportedly nervous about those folks) know who's who?
- "Solutions to problems like this are not just one law away." (Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-SC)
Absolutely right, but each tightened gun control law is a step toward stanching the proliferation of illegal guns. We can start somewhere.
- Legislators who favor gun control will lose the next election. That means you, Liberals!
That's the threat of the NRA and the more virulent advocates of gun rights, that legions of single-issue voters will flock to the polls. But if you say you are a single-issue liberal and that your issue is guns, you are not a liberal, much less a progressive. If enough legislators back tougher background checks, to pick an issue to focus on, there is no practical way the NRA and its Yea-Sayers can attend to their defeat. One strong success could unmask this Wizard of Oz that is today's NRA.
Oh, there are more arguments. Adam Gopnik, writing for The New Yorker, in "Charleston, and the Next Time" summed it up well:
On most public issues, there are two reasonable views, even when one view
seems, to put it mildly, cruel — the view, say, that poor people should be left
without medical insurance. But on gun control there aren’t. All the facts are in;
all the social science is long settled; the constitutional positions are clear, if
contested, and the wiser way known and shared by mankind. On one side are
facts, truth, and common sense. On the other, an obsession with dark fantasies
of individual autonomy and power — the sheer fetishistic thrill of owning lethal
weapons. On one side is the sanity and common sense shared by the entire
world; on the other, murder and madness and a strange ongoing American
mania. If we don’t change, then, well — it will happen again, again. And then
again.
The United States has far more deaths by gun than deaths due to terrorism ... by many orders of magnitude. From
"Obama's Evolving Outrage On Guns":
[I]n an interview with the BBC, [President Obama] stated, eloquently and succinctly, the basic circumstance of [the] American case: “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings.” He also pointed out that, in the years since the September 11th attacks, fewer than a hundred Americans have been killed by terrorism, and tens of thousands by gun violence. (One can only imagine what laws we would have instated had organized terrorists instead of random terror killed so many.)
Daily Kos's Firearms Law and Policy group studies actions for reducing firearm deaths and injuries in a manner that is consistent with the Supreme Court's application of the Second Amendment.
To see our list of original and republished diaries, go to the Firearms Law and Policy diary list. Click on the ♥ or the word "Follow" next to our group name to add our posts to your stream.
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