It’s been a few months since I’ve had the energy to tkae on a gun thread, but what the hey - it’s time to jump back in.
First of all, I have problems with weirddave’s breakdown of gun deaths into (1) accidents, and (2) crimes. It’s a bit more complicated than that, as tracer’s sig (and MisterEck’s stats) would suggest.
(Btw, M.Ecks, more recent stats were cited in earlier gun control threads; if I remember, I’ll track them down later and link to them.)
Let’s try this breakdown of gun deaths:
- Suicides. Whether they’re off the table or not, they’re big.
- Murders as part of a criminal enterprise - where someone’s killed in the course of a robbery, a rape, a rivalry between gangs competing over drug turf, or whatever.
- Murders committed by a previously more-or-less law-abiding citizen who got pissed, lost it, whatever. Harris and Klebold, the day-trader in Atlanta last year, the guy who killed his ex-wife yesterday in Georgia, and so forth.
- Accidents.
- Other. (There’ll always be uncategorizable stuff.)
I would suggest that (2) and (3) are fundamentally different, and if we’re going to try to reduce gun deaths, we’re going to have to attack them differently. (No upping-the-punishment strategy is going to touch #3, for instance.) First thing is, do we have any sort of handle on how many of each of these there are? It’s damned hard to do triage on our problems without numbers.
Anyhow, let me address a few of the issues that have appeared in this thread:
Gun locks: MGibson brought up the fact that they’re already freely available for purchase. True, but who thought to do it? The same was true of seat belts before we mandated that they be installed in new cars. And after that mandate, voluntary seat belt use went way up. If trigger locks are a part of every gun sale, they might be used 20% of the time instead of 1% of the time. I call that progress.
Gun Education: I’m all for the availability of voluntary gun education, run by the local law enforcement agencies.
I’m against any access to our schoolchildren during the school day by groups of any nature - political, religious, commercial, issue-oriented - with something to sell, be it a god, a product or an ideology. This goes for groups on both sides of the gun debate - HCI as well as the NRA. (Can’t tell me the NRA isn’t in the propaganda business, not after hearing “they’re coming to take away our guns” bushwa for more than three decades, along with their violent opposition to even the most mild gun-regulation proposals of the past three-plus decades.)
For me, this is part of a larger issue that’s beyond the scope of this thread, as you can probably tell. When I become a parent, I don’t want to worry about whose captive audience my kids are part of, when I send them off to school.
Better enforcement of existing laws: I’m delighted to see the NRA’s belated support for this, even if it’s really a red herring to stall more effective gun legislation. In recent years, the NRA has been trying to starve the ATF, which has the mandate of Federal firearms law enforcement.
However, more use of the death penalty is ridiculous, for any purpose. As a nation, we’ve shown that we don’t regard administration of the death penalty to be taken with any degree of seriousness and gravity.
Making guns retroactively illegal: OK, when has this been done? And, tracer, my feeling about CA’s vague law about registration of semi-automatic assault weapons is this: if groups like the NRA were willing to occasionally help write more precise legislation, rather than simply try to defeat it, then gripe about it when it passes, the legislation might be more clearly written.
Comparison of accidental gun deaths with other accidental -death stats: Apples and oranges. Excepting the suicides, all gun deaths are accidental, from the perspective of the victim. The appropriate comparison is between gun deaths other than suicides, and deaths from falls, other than suicides. (And given that it’s usually hard to demonstrate that a death from a fall was a suicide unless someone saw the person jump, maybe it should simply be gun deaths v. deaths from falls.) And so forth.
You don’t hear of children minorly wounded: You do if it’s local, e.g. the shootings at the National Zoo, the day after Easter. Shot-and-wounded rarely makes the national news; shot-and-killed does. Why is this surprising?
Why aren’t the Mothers marching against all violence: Because (1) if your cause is too unfocused, nobody’s going to pay attention, and (2) while guns don’t kill, it’s a damned sight easier to kill with a gun than with a knife, a garrote, or one’s hands. Ever hear of a drive-by strangling? Neither have I. If I’m confronted by a maniac with a knife, he’s out of luck if he’s not either a fast runner or an accurate thrower; if he’s got a gun, I can forget about outrunning his bullets.
This is why people in general, including the Moms, are much more concerned about gun violence than most other kinds. Geez Louise.
If the Moms were really concerned about gun violence, they’d be patrolling the projects:* Since I’ve never heard of the NRA doing that, I guess that makes it clear that the NRA’s concern about gun violence in America is bogus.
That’s sarcasm, btw. I’m not implying here that the NRA is unconcerned about gun violence. And I’m convinced that most all of the pro-gun posters here that I’ve tangled with on this issue are concerned about gun violence; we just see the possible solutions differently.
Gun control and racism: Connecting the modern gun-control movement with post-Reconstruction attempts to keep guns out of ex-slaves’ hands is, to say the least, a complete cheap shot.
To the extent that I’ve seen poll breakdowns, btw, urban residents seem to be pretty strongly for gun control. (Opposition to gun control seems to be strongest in rural areas.) So unless you’ve got data to the contrary, I’d say it’s out of line to categorize the gun-control forces as a bunch of white suburbanites attempting to deprive city-dwellers of color of the right to defend themselves.
Or anyone else, for that matter. While the past year has resulted in some new voices for banning handguns (I personally am against this), the gun-control movement, by and large, has made no attempt to pass legislation restricting the right to posess firearms suitable for self-defense at short range, or for hunting legal game.
With respect to HCI, I’ve seen a 1976 quote by one of their then-officers indicating he sought to ban handguns. Since the late 1980s, during which time I’ve been a member off-and -on, I’ve seen nothing in their literature attempting to garner support for banning handguns or hunting weapons.
How I personally see it is, there are a lot of guns out there that are clearly designed as offensive weapons: that is, they’re clearly far more useful for either shooting a whole bunch of people at once, or for shooting people at a distance that precludes attempts at self-defense (e.g. sniper rifles that can kill from over a mile away). I don’t know that I could write a law clearly distinguishing one from the other, and the Moms probably couldn’t either, but I’m sure they’d largely share my sentiment.
Maybe they and the NRA could get together and draft legislation that more clearly distinguished weapons for hunting and self-defense from offensive firepower, and maybe they could work together to affirm the legitimacy of the former while banning the latter. I bet the Moms would be willing, if anyone from the NRA cared to call and ask.
And maybe gerbils will fly, too.