Guns vs people
I was skimming my Facebook feed this morning on the bus, as is not uncommon for me to do. As is also not uncommon, I came across a post from a friend (don't remember who, presumably one of my pro-gun southern buddies) linking a letter to the editor in some newspaper that may or may not have been fake (I didn't bother to look it up, because its veracity is not the point).
The letter was essentially a rephrasing of an old joke - a man writing to the newspaper to inform them/the reading public, rather snarkily, that after leaving his shotgun propped in his front door with the bullets RIGHT THERE, that not once all day did the damn thing kill anyone, nor even bother to load itself! Of course, making a rather spectacled point of the old saw, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
I've always loved Eddie Izzard's response to that, by the way - "...but I think the gun helps, you know? ...I just think just standing there going 'Bang!' - that's not gonna kill too many people, is it?"
But I got to thinking, y'know... why do we take these complicated issues and boil them down like this? Guns vs people, which one is to blame for gun deaths! Anti-gun-control, Right-to-Bear-Arms, Second-Amendment'ers, shouting that people are the real enemy here, not guns, as if that somehow settles the matter... Is anyone out there really trying to ban guns? And I don't mean "keep them out of peoples' hands." I mean, is anyone trying to eradicate the existence of weapons? Make it illegal to manufacture them, own them, destroy all the guns in existence and then destroy all the technologies that have led to creating them so that we can NEVER make any guns ever again?
Because that seems to me to be the natural assumption behind such an extremely polarized argument as "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Take the "guns vs people" argument to the other extreme - get rid of people, and you don't have people killing people anymore - is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So that's clearly also not the solution.
When we think about gun related violence/deaths, we need to consider both sides of the problem in equal measure. Which guns do we let what kinds of people have access to/use of, and why? And if it really is just people that are the problem, Second-Amendment'ers, then what do you propose we do to fix "people" and prevent them from killing people? Because it's not just criminals that are committing violence (or it is, because violence is a crime). People are just people until they commit that first crime, although sometimes they're mentally unstable people, or desperate people, or perhaps have some other correlatable, fixable problem. And I'm no sociologist, but how much crime arises from opportunity? In other words, give someone an obvious power imbalance (such as access to a powerful weapon) and are they perhaps more likely simply because they are more able to take advantage of someone else?
Certainly things to think about. This is not the only issue that gets so polarized, either, but it's what I happened to be thinking about this morning. Discussion is welcome, so long as it is civil.
The letter was essentially a rephrasing of an old joke - a man writing to the newspaper to inform them/the reading public, rather snarkily, that after leaving his shotgun propped in his front door with the bullets RIGHT THERE, that not once all day did the damn thing kill anyone, nor even bother to load itself! Of course, making a rather spectacled point of the old saw, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
I've always loved Eddie Izzard's response to that, by the way - "...but I think the gun helps, you know? ...I just think just standing there going 'Bang!' - that's not gonna kill too many people, is it?"
But I got to thinking, y'know... why do we take these complicated issues and boil them down like this? Guns vs people, which one is to blame for gun deaths! Anti-gun-control, Right-to-Bear-Arms, Second-Amendment'ers, shouting that people are the real enemy here, not guns, as if that somehow settles the matter... Is anyone out there really trying to ban guns? And I don't mean "keep them out of peoples' hands." I mean, is anyone trying to eradicate the existence of weapons? Make it illegal to manufacture them, own them, destroy all the guns in existence and then destroy all the technologies that have led to creating them so that we can NEVER make any guns ever again?
Because that seems to me to be the natural assumption behind such an extremely polarized argument as "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Take the "guns vs people" argument to the other extreme - get rid of people, and you don't have people killing people anymore - is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So that's clearly also not the solution.
When we think about gun related violence/deaths, we need to consider both sides of the problem in equal measure. Which guns do we let what kinds of people have access to/use of, and why? And if it really is just people that are the problem, Second-Amendment'ers, then what do you propose we do to fix "people" and prevent them from killing people? Because it's not just criminals that are committing violence (or it is, because violence is a crime). People are just people until they commit that first crime, although sometimes they're mentally unstable people, or desperate people, or perhaps have some other correlatable, fixable problem. And I'm no sociologist, but how much crime arises from opportunity? In other words, give someone an obvious power imbalance (such as access to a powerful weapon) and are they perhaps more likely simply because they are more able to take advantage of someone else?
Certainly things to think about. This is not the only issue that gets so polarized, either, but it's what I happened to be thinking about this morning. Discussion is welcome, so long as it is civil.