(Thanks to David Flanders for this one….)
A high-profile shooting, like the June 17 crime that left dead nine members of a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, is typically followed by calls for greater gun control, along with counter arguments that the best way to stop gun crimes is with more guns…. “The one thing that would have at least ameliorated the horrible situation in Charleston would have been that if somebody in that prayer meeting had a conceal carry or there had been either an off-duty policeman or an on-duty policeman, somebody with the legal authority to carry a firearm and could have stopped the shooter,” presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said in a Fox News interview on June 19. A new study, however, throws cold water on the idea that a well-armed populace deters criminals or prevents murders. Instead, higher ownership of guns in a state is linked to more firearm robberies, more firearm assaults and more homicide in general. [5 Milestones in Gun Control History]…. “We found no support for the hypothesis that owning more guns leads to a drop or a reduction in violent crime,” said study researcher Michael Monuteaux, an epidemiologist and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “Instead, we found the opposite.”
There are few more thoroughly delusional and unfounded beliefs than the canard that MORGUNZ!!! equals more safety. MORGUNZ!!! can only serve to keep us safer, so the argument goes, because the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. It’s the NRA’s version of the Big Lie, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbel’s theory that if you repeat a lie often enough and with enough conviction it will eventually be accepted as true (Godwin’s Law invoked in 4…3…2….). And Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © believe this Big Lie in the same way they believe in God, Mom, and Apple Pie.
OF COURSE it’s true that MORGUNZ!!! can only make us safer. It’s just simple common sense…right?? Bad guy with gun opens fire in public area; good guy with gun puts him down. BOOM!!! Problem solved. Good guy with gun is a hero, gets the girl, and rides off into a majestic sunset to live happily ever after. Except that scenario rarely ever plays out. Why? Because a mass shooting is such a shock to the system, something so incomprehensible as to in some cases actually paralyze people. There’s no valid reason to expect someone who’s not a law enforcement officer or a trained soldier to react “properly” to what is in effect an urban combat scenario. Study after study has shown that something like 80% of soldiers never even fire their weapon in a combat situation. Think about that for a moment- four of five soldiers trained for combat don’t (either through refusal or inability by paralysis) fire their weapons in combat. If trained soldiers seize up in the crucible of combat, how can we credibly expect an untrained civilian to take down a shooter in a mall or on a college campus? We can’t, because it doesn’t happen…yet what do we hear Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © reciting as if it was Gospel:
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. That sounds as if it should be self-evident…except that It’s. Just. Not. True. Repeating it incessantly doesn’t make it true.
Numerous studies have found that gun ownership correlates with gun homicide, and homicide by gun is the most common type of homicide in the United States. In 2013, for example, there were 16,121 total homicides in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and 11,208 of those were carried out with a firearm. (Gun suicides outpace gun homicides by far; in 2013, the CDC recorded 21,175 suicides by firearm, about half of all suicides that year. Contrary to popular belief, suicide is typically an impulsive act, psychiatrists say. Ninety percent of people who attempt suicide once will not go on to complete a suicide later, but a suicide attempt using a gun is far more lethal than other methods.)
Beyond the mythology of a Good Guy With a Gun saving the day, there’s the question of what happens to bullets once they’re turned loose. Opening fire doesn’t mean that rounds, once they exit a weapon’s muzzle, will go where the shooter intends. Bullets don’t think, they don’t have a sense of right and wrong, and they don’t care about “good guys” or “bad guys.” They simply obey the laws of physics. This means that it’s every bit as likely that a round fired may travel to places and strike people or things the shooter never intended. Friendly fire casualties are almost inevitable in a firefight of any sort. It’s never as simple as a good guy with a gun coolly and bravely taking out a bad guy with a gun. That could certainly happen, of course, but the truth is that few among us would be able to maintain our composure in an unexpected mass shooting scenario. It’s far more likely that if a good guy did have a gun and had the wherewithal to fire it he’d cause significant unintended casualties along the way.
I have to believe that at our most basic we’re all the same, in that no one wants to see innocent lives ended. Yet Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © resist anything even faintly redolent of common sense gun control with every fiber of their being. Shortly after the mass shooting at UC-Santa Barbara, Samuel Wurzelbacher (“Joe the Plumber”) wrote that “your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” For the sake of my own sanity, I have to assume that Wurzelbacher and his fellow Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © aren’t monsters. Many of them even have children…so how is it they can so callously believe the lives of the children of others to be of less value than their own children? How is it they value their “gun rights” over human life (that many are also virulently “pro-life” is a glaring hypocrisy and contradiction…but best left for another time)?
It’s difficult to get past the sense that Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © really don’t see a problem…as long as it’s someone else burying a loved one. If a mass shooting scenario doesn’t extinguish the flame of one of their own, it remains an abstract concept…one that will undoubtedly be used by Liberal Gun Grabbers as an excuse to curtail their God-given inalienable 2nd Amendment rights.
The problem is that we can’t have a rational discussion about the undeniable epidemic of gun violence when one side refuses to even acknowledge the problem. When one side metaphorically plugs their ears and screams “LALALALALALALALA!!!” whenever common sense gun control is mentioned, there’s no hope of finding common ground. There can be no possibility or hope of meeting in the middle when Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © define compromise as capitulation.
It may well take a mass shooting targeting Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © before they wake up and smell the cat litter. It would be a tragedy were that to happen, but when the horror of gun violence is viewed as merely an abstract concept, it may take having that tragedy dropped on one’s doorstep before the true impact of the problem is acknowledged.
Despite the fervor with which Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © believe MOR GUNZ!!! equals more safety, it’s simply not true…and there’s ample evidence to support that truth. All MOR GUNZ!!! does is to increase the potential lethality of daily life.
It’s time Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © stopped hiding behind the lies and propaganda and participate in a conversation about making ALL of us safer from random, senseless gun violence.
Or dead kids DO trump your twisted, self-centered definition of your Constitutional rights.
