Here is a simple and logical argument regarding gun control:
In the wake of tragedies like Sandy Hook, everyone stops and wonders what lies behind violence like this. More importantly, they wonder how to prevent it from happening again.
Some argue for greater gun control. Others argue for a gun ban.
The first argument is solid. The second is ill-advised.
Here’s why.
The USA and Canada both have liberal gun laws, affording their citizens the chance to own all kinds of firearms. Yet the proportion of gun-related crimes in the US is much higher. Namely, the States account for over and above ten thousand gun deaths, whereas only around fifty are reported in Canada.
This astonishing statistic testifies to the fact that culture plays a major role in gun homicide. It’s not a Canadian blip. Canada is not some tootie-frutie exception that keeps lethal shootings admirably low in spite of how lethal guns can be.
Switzerland, another country whose citizenry is armed, enjoys an astonishingly low rate of around thirty gun-related homicides per year.
Clearly the guns are not an issue in themselves. They don’t kill by just being there. They’re subject to factors, cultural or otherwise — forces that pull the trigger.
What kind of forces and factors? The pioneering and revolutionary kind, of course. Gun toting comes pack and parcel with the US and its renegade underscore. Gun use and lethal force are heavily spliced in the country’s cultural DNA.
It sounds bad, and it is bad, in objective terms, but it’s the way it is. I’d like to see anyone try to change that. I really would.
See, in a world of logic and acumen, one realizes that you have to deal with each case individually.
Like it or not, the US is a pretty exceptional case when dealing with firearms, and should be addressed as such, without too much ideology. Pragmatism yields results.
Firearms are no exception — they ought to be dealt with in pragmatic terms. Dealing with the problem of mass shootings, screening the homicidally-inclined and the mentally unstable, while preserving the right of the average citizen to be armed, is the way to go. Anything more than that, anything that smells of blanket restrictions, will backfire.
Blind moralism will only bring about another Prohibition.
We all remember how well the other Prohibition, that little 20′s restrictive policy, went for the US.
Seems like we don’t. Seems like people want to repeat the process.
Like I said, people have short memories and a penchant for being self-righteous, be they conservative and religious or liberal and against guns. One prohibition didn’t work, but many people think that another one will do the trick.
It won’t.