Stop right there that condescending tone, thanks. You spend as much time on Tumblr as all of us, so you’ve got no cause feeling that preachy. And dancing on graves of maimed and killed children while their families are grieving to push a political agenda is… quite.. disgusting, tbh.
There’s « a lot » of firearms in the USA. If « gun violence » was such a problem, that country would be in more or less the same situation as Syria or Mexico.
Most of the registered « gun violence » is made of suicides and gangs assaults. I’ll come back to that later.
The other side of the « gun violence » is the numerous cases of self-defense situations where almost-victims were able to save there body integrity, their lives, those of passerby or their families’. Just the reported ones (where shots were fired and police was involved) outmatch greatly the case of criminal use of firearms.
That leaves all the other uncounted cases where a tragic situation would have happened if the prey would have been disarmed and unable to dodge the proverbial bullet.
Blaming guns while forgetting their positive social outcome is like crying about vaccines because of their potential side effects.
Back to suicides. Suicidal people don’t need guns to get themselves off. Restricting the access of guns to citizens in the guise of preventing self-harm is at best ineffective, at worst hypocritical.
Case in point : Japan.
Gang violence ? It’s the same. You won’t reduce at all people shooting at each others with illegal guns for territorial/criminal reasons. Newsflash : criminals don’t care much about laws, and guns are only tools (mostly I should say since guns have also a certain macho appeal) to them. Prohibition doesn’t work, never has, never will. Guns, drugs, sex… People manage to get drugs and cellphones in places like prisons. Drugs are flowing all over the planet despite their quasi-universal banning ; and their prohibition has only two effects : rising the risks for the traders, hence the profit margins and then the violence associated to these marginal activities.
Cases in point : most of drugs producing Latin America countries, Western Europe (the Kalashnikov burst has replaced the putaing cong as end punctuation in Marseille), a few African countries, Russia, disenfranchised urban areas in the USA… You want to take care of 80 % of violent crime in one month ? Get rid of the War on Drugs, and reform the healthcare and educational systems to be non-arbitrary, efficient and effective.
What do we have left ? Crimes of passion, accidents, and the always dramatic « amok » cases. Whatever the level of gun control you inject in a society, you won’t have much impacts on these categories of « gun violence » neither.
Accidents are the easiest to get rid of : education, ideally by parents, but at school if needed, about the rules of gun safety and killing the unhealthy attraction to guns by satisfying kids’ curiosity about firearms before it goes bad (violence porn, all that jazz). Notice the same approach can be used for drugs, with quite an effective result.
Crimes of passions are complicated. Men traditionally kill their partners with guns or fists, women with poison, cars or knives.
It would be better to prevent the situation before it goes nasty, but even with divorce, violence judiciary prevention and social help, tragedies still happen. Maybe a few cases could be avoided with a Japanese-style gun control system, but that’s a huge maybe, and other solutions would be more effective anyway without infringing other people’s civil rights.
At least, « amok ». Since you’re the one wanting to reform the system, the burden of proof regarding the effectiveness of gun control is on you. I empirically don’t believe it would do much. At the difference of suicide or passion crime, motherfuckers doing that don’t act on impulse. They plan, they think, they give themselves the means to « score » the most to get the best headlines in the newscasts. If they can have access to the very dangerous semi-automatic rifles… they’ll find other means ─ trucks, knives, explosive or fire bombs… Case in point : France, Germany, UK, Spain, Japan, China…
Remember the worst genocide of the end of the XXth Century was expedited with machettes, stones, sticks and gasoline. Violence is a serious issue, and you won’t get rid of it by letting the minority of culprits enjoy the freedom of bullying/raping/loot/murder the majority of citizens. Firearms are a tool of freedom, democracy and equality. There’s no other practical way to compensate for physical handicaps (either in age, strength, speed, stamina…) against stronger or multiple aggressors. Why would you want to get rid of that beautiful tool ?
Is that an acceptable risk to endure ? For most people, yes, for me, absolutely ─ at the condition you don’t disarm the people exposed to these risks. IMHO, the only antidote against « amok » cases (outside huge social, educational, economical, urban or healthcare related reforms that would limit the risks of letting disturbed and outcasted individual taking revenge against innocent crowds) is to harden the targets by getting rid of gun-free zones and advertising the fact armed random people are ready to fight back any kind of attack if necessary.
You do realize, of course, that these « amok » cases are only isolated incidents, tragic and dramatic, obviously, but quite the anomaly, and happening in all developped countries (and always for the same reasons).
In any case, I’m not saying the American situation is excellent or the way to go, but removing the (legal) guns of the equation not only would have almost no impact on « gun violence », but would cost trillions and leave citizens at the mercy of criminals and authorities (and we all know how much the police and justice system is fair, benevolent and brave).
What could they do instead ? If we take Switzerland situation, where violent crime rose as soon as the first federal gun control laws were implemented (correlation is not causation), we know the recipe ─ lot of social control, tightened communities, very good level of education and quality of life, possibilities of finding well-paid work, quality mental healthcare, strong national identity, control of the authorities by the population, the whole lot making the huge number of guns available (a non-negligible number being full-auto assault rifles at milita members’ homes) absolutely innocuous.
Unsurprisingly, that works for most of the countries blessed with low level of violence, like Japan or Norway.
tl;dr : I wouldn’t mind gun control if it was working and useful. After all, guns are not magical items getting rid of all the bad things happening in the world when they are in the hands of « the good guys ». But they are still one of the best tool given to the citizen and human being to get rid of oppression.
Gun control doesn’t work, because it just try to get rid of the symptoms (« gun violence », as if guns were virus or some kind of dangerous animals on rampage), and not the causes of the problems.
Most European countries are now riddled with an impressive level of random violence, and while that trend went down in the USA, it went up in all the countries that adopted strong gun control.
Because people don’t care if they are victims of « gun violence », « truck violence », « knife violence », « kick in the head violence » or « IED violence ». They just don’t want to be victims.
- gun control masterpost : http://therevenantrising.tumblr.com/tagged/gun-control-master-post
- the UK gun control fallacy : https://schweizerqualit.at/post/170902888369/how-do-you-think-the-attack-stopped-with-a-few
- gun control in general : https://schweizerqualit.at/post/166002456994/little-fangirl27-little-fangirl27-hat-auf-dein
https://schweizerqualit.at/post/163254466224/deadbabysoup-siryouarebeingmocked
https://schweizerqualit.at/post/161923595187/laurentbelkacem-derrainer-hat-auf-deine
https://schweizerqualit.at/post/166506576644/cwright-1-unpopular-opinion-theres-no-such
