Thread: Thoughts on Gun Control

This post MAY be slightly controversial. I speak as someone who grew up fairly conservative and reactionary. I like guns and I enjoy shooting. I appreciate both the technical genius and the aesthetic of firearms. I am, in some ways, a gun nut. As a Canadian, I grew up in a country with fairly comprehensive if a little haphazard gun control, and it has grown more restrictive rather than less. Many 'gun control' laws are based around the aesthetics of a firearm rather than its capability. This is really quite silly but I understand it. Some firearms simply look scary and that leads to reactionary action by politicians who simply want to give the appearance of doing something. Reading over Canada's gun control laws gives dozens of examples of this sort of thing, and leads to some rather silly inclusions and exclusions. Given the money, I would gladly collect firearms. Given the opportunity I could quite happily shoot every day. I don't hunt anymore but I have, and I'm glad that I have the skills however rusty they are. Treated with respect and used by intelligent people with proper safety training, firearms are no more dangerous than cars. BUT I am fervently in favour of gun control, and even in restrictions on the kinds of firearms that are available for purchase. Why? Because Humans are frelling stupid. Because letting every bonehead, redneck, bigot, lunatic, whacko and wingnut who wants to tool up like Rambo on a bad day buy a gun is the worst kind of government sponsored negligent homicide. I would love for people to be smart enough, good enough and trustworty enough to be allowed to own whatever weapons they wish... but fifty percent of the population is below average and most people I've met I wouldn't trust with anything more dangerous than a squirtgun. The last time I looked at the statistics, firearms were responsible for something like 900,000 deaths in the United States in the last thirty years. That's pretty telling. That suggests that you are several thousand times more likely to be killed in a firearms related crime or accident than you are in a terrorist bombing, for instance. Would I like to turn back the clock to the days when I could own just about anything legally? Absolutely I would. But I'm mature enough now to know that I don't need fully automatic weapons, high capacity magazines or even a handgun. Of course, I'm a Canadian. If I lived in the States I might feel a little less secure, speccy, corduroy wearing liberal progressive that I am. Even then, I have no use for an AR-15 or a high capacity handgun. I have no use, for that matter, for most firearms. A shotgun or a lever action rifle for hunting and the coming zombiepocalypse would more than suit my needs. I am hardly unique in this. No one, no matter how dangerous their neighborhood, has any need for a rapid fire repeating military weapon unless they are busily waging a guerrilla war. Moreover no gun is much use against real military weapons. Not anymore. The second amendment is obsolete, when it comes to private gun ownership. To my mind it was overtaken by the Militia Act of 1903 that established the National Guard more or less as it exists today. In a time of drones, jets, tanks and body armour simple firearms have been surpassed by military weapons. Unless you suggest that civilians should be allowed to own artillery, rocket launchers, mortars and armored vehicles, there is no way that any 'militia' could actually stand up to an organized military with even WWII era weaponry, much less a truly modern arsenal. But as posters above have mentioned, the gun is built right into American culture at a very deep level. Part of just how brutally violent and when viewed closely, repellent American history really is. I speak as an outsider but the fetishization of the gun and of the right to own guns has grown more and more ridiculous over the course of my life. The NRA have grown more and more extreme and if you read their screeds carefully more and more racist as time has passed. What was once an organization of sportsmen and hunters has turned into a lunatic fringe political lobbying group funded in large part by the gun manufacturers. So what to do? It's far too late to try to reclaim the thousands of semi-automatic rifles, pistols, high capacity magazines and other not-quite-paramilitary weapons that are already in private hands. But it's just simple logic to try and reduce the number of dangerous weapons in unreliable hands by instituting such things as background checks and closing some of the more egregious loopholes. Require mandatory background checks. Remove the right for felons to own a gun. Make the criminals work a little harder to get one than just going to a gun show in the next state and flashing some phony I.D. The very best and most entertaining, from a schadenfreude point of view way to run a gun registry would be to make the corporations that manufacture the weapons ultimately responsible for tracking the sale of every firearm they sell, down to the . It's terribly impractical and just suggesting it I can hear the screams from the gun merchants, but it would be fun to watch them squirm, wouldn't it? A better thought is requiring firearms owners to buy insurance policies for their guns, to help cover the costs of accident and injury. Or at least make people register. Tax the guns and the ammunition. Create a few thousand new federal jobs, dozens or even hundreds in every state, by building a firearms registry and requiring owners to register their guns. Require all newly manufactured guns to be registered from the manufacturer to the point of sale. Require background checks for every license, and more stringent checks for concealed carry licenses. Close the loopholes around personal transfer and sales at gun shows. There are dozens of things that could be done to make life safer for everyone who has to live around guns. The statistics from other countries are utterly clear gun control WORKS. It makes people safer. It reduces the number of deaths from firearms. It's not rocket science. It's just basic statistics, some logic and a little compassion. Really people, it's not that complicated. So why do they fight it?