“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.” – Mayor Daley, link heads to Founding Bloggers
What an interesting statement. I must agree that (and to me this is obvious) crazy individual people should be treated as crazy individuals. When there are groups of crazy individuals, the rules have to change.
It’s possible that Mayor Daley is politically posturing and spinning the tragedy into a rally call for stiffer gun control. Even if he is, such a statement would gain no ground and would make him look foolish if there weren’t already people who believe that it’s absolutely true.
There are people that argue with me about gun control, and 99% of the time, they start with a bad assumption.
- Less guns = less suicides
- Theives use owner’s guns against them all the time
- Innocent bystanders get shot by legally carried guns
- Fatal shooting accidents are just as common as murders
- More guns turns normal anger like road rage into killings
These assumptions are not backed up by factual information. It doesn’t seem to matter how many papers or statistics I cite, these arguments inevitably end with me being accused of believing false information. That’s rather convenient. Rather than have to find fact or theory that’s a credible defense of their point, they simply dismiss my sources altogether. So I stopped arguing about numbers and reality, I’ll meet them on the philosophical and anecdotal levels.
To their credit, I’ve never encountered one of these arguments in which I’m accused of lying or somehow craving death and murder, so that’s a good thing.
It’s amazing though how closed-minded the anti-gun movement really is. Actual shooting injury and death data are waved away outright or openly skewed to fit their imagination.
The original imagined scenarios aren’t completely without logic. The most recent discussion, which took place about a month ago, was with a coworker. She, with no prompt from me, jumped from road-rage to handguns. She said she just couldn’t understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow people to carry guns, (paraphrase): “What if all these people that yell and get out of their cars and carry baseball bats, what if they had a gun? Then instead of someone getting punched, well now they’re dead!”
Okay, sounds logical, but it doesn’t happen that way. My favorite example is a good friend of mine who has a permit, and also has the quickest, most fiery temper I’ve ever seen. He’s a good man though, and hasn’t gotten in trouble with the law, which is why they gave him the permit. When he carries, he’s a different man. Totally calm. There’s a mental barrier there and I know why my coworker doesn’t trust it and it’s a good thing. She doesn’t understand the barrier because her’s has never been tested. There’s a similar mental barrier that keeps people from being attracted to family members or to persons of inappropriate age. So yes, there’s people who cross that line, but rarely is it sudden and unpredictable, and when it is, I’d like to be armed so they don’t kill too many people before they’re stopped.
And that’s the second point: if there’s no guns, it means whomever has a bomb or other efficient weapon has enormous power.
I like to use metaphors to put things in a different light. Rape is worse than murder in some ways, at least in my opinion, and should be treated with a similar level of horror. So if the police were the only ones that could stop rape, would you trust them to show up? Would you trust them so much that you’d feel safe? Or is it easier to imagine that the vast majority of people, given the means and opportunity, would go to great lengths to stop or prevent a rape and not participate in one.
Stiff gun control forces the public to trust the government. Think about it. Do you really trust congress, judges, senators, state troopers to fight tooth and nail on your behalf? To make sound, just decisions more than you’d trust your friends (um, the ones who haven’t been convicted of crimes and have passed safety and legality courses)?
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You should check out the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog. It’s an aggregator of news stories about people who use guns to defend themselves. If people won’t be swayed by statistics, perhaps an onslaught of anecdotal evidence will do it?
And I know that you’re shying away from statistics (understandably), but in a review of over 4,100 self defense cases, an attacker used a person’s gun against them 7 times. In the same 4,100 cases there were only 4 accidental shootings.
But the source for that statistic was an NRA magazine, so no matter how well documented the research is, anti-gun people will still claim it’s invalid.
It makes sense to doubt any information that is favorable in the same direction as the profit motive. I have no problem with that. Sometimes though, it makes perfect sense.
Like I’m sure a health food producer has no problem getting statistical information about the dangers of over-processed junk food.
The test is to look at the refutations. How about the anti-gun organizations. What kind of numbers do they publish and how do they get them? They’ve been caught more than once skewing in their favor. Like the blanket term “gun violence” which usually includes all shootings, like an officer stopping a gun-wielding criminal.
Not that if A is false, then B must be true, but if there are people that feel so passionately about this topic, you’d think they’d be able to find fault in pro-gun usage statistics, or clear proof that a culture is worse off for baring arms. If they can’t, does that mean their passion is overstated? Or their intelligence? Or their integrity?
I have no problem with someone that wants tighter control of firearms, or no firearms. A person can have whatever opinion they like and it’s their business, but I’ll at least try to take bad assumptions out of the mix. A disagreeable point is here nor there, but false information or no information is kind of annoying.
Oh, and as a wise man once wrote in a Letter to the Editor: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.