# Wisconsin Sikh Temple Shooting \[and gun control\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 5, 2012, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wisconsin-sikh-temple-shooting-and-gun-control/630556 "2012-08-05T22:31:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 123
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2012, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wisconsin-sikh-temple-shooting-and-gun-control/630556/123 "2012-08-07T20:10:24Z")
> [@Sekigahara](#): > > It’s rather astonishing to read these boards and find people arguing that the sale of guns and ammunition should not be strictly controlled, despite the regular occurrence of gun massacres in the United States (and elsewhere). All of the false-equivalence arguments aside, automatic pistols and assault-style rifles are designed for one thing: to kill people. Of course if you make them widely and easily available, more people will be killed by them. It’s really that simple. And yet you’re still more likely to die in a plane crash or be struck by lightning than to be shot by a spree shooter. People have been going on shooting rampages pretty much since cartridge revolvers were invented in the 1860s. Semi-automatics have existed since the 1890s and the .45 ACP dates from 1911. Yet somehow people weren’t calling for abolishing the civil ownership of guns back then. I blame modern media. Before television one might read in a newspaper an account of a shooting in another state days or weeks after the fact, if at all. Now a shooting anywhere in the civilized world of billions of people gets televised in an hour or less. If you completely abolished the private ownership of firearms, you would probably see some reduction in- not elimination of- shootings. Nuts and criminals who wanted guns badly enough would still get them. And this at the price of disarming the weak: women, the elderly, the outnumbered, who would go back to being helpless against people stronger than them or being ganged up on. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wisconsin-sikh-temple-shooting-and-gun-control/630556)._