Gun Control Revisited

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, yet another call for “increased gun control” has gone up.  The other night, Piers Morgan got in a name-calling match with a non-NRA gun rights advocate, Mr. Pratt.  Obviously tempers are flaring left and right.  The issue isn’t guns per se, but illicit use thereof.  As yet we have no self-shooting, self-aware AR-15s lurking in school hallways, movie theaters, or other places taking out innocent bystanders.  Despite consistent liberal misperceptions to the contrary, weapons do NOT fire themselves.  Some living, breathing, conscious person has to make the fateful decision to pull the trigger.

Morgan made some remark to the effect of, US has a population of 300 million, and it has 211 (?) million guns, so how can this not be a problem?  Well, if all those guns were in the hands of sensible gun owners, that would not be a problem.  If they were all in the hands of homicidal maniacs, I’d say that would be a problem.  But it’s too simplistic to say “there are too many guns”, as if, every July 4^th, Ted Nugent flies over the country, coming down our chimneys, distributing Bushmasters and Desert Eagles to every household, even those with small children, crazy maniacs, or Obama voters.  The guns in our country tend to be concentrated in the hands of gun owners and criminals.

For the purpose of this debate, I see there being two types of potential gun owners in this country, Type A and Type B.  Type A are the law-abiding, sensible, intelligent, sane, responsible gun owners who don’t break laws, don’t shoot up schools, or otherwise cause any problems.  Type B are the others who we wouldn’t trust with guns: children, criminals, the insane, and otherwise attitude-misadjusted types.

The majority of private gun owners fall into Type A.  To the extent they use their weapons at all, it’s at ranges, safely banging away at paper targets.  Like me, they may never have actually shot at anyone in anger or in combat.

The gun control types have this image in their heads of gun owners as dangerous lunatics, cleaning their guns while naked children run around, with a fifth of Jack Daniels in front of them and a cigarette dangling from their lips, wearing a dirty wife beater and soiled boxers.  As a child, this man tortured animals.  He married his sister and beats her regularly.  And having guns around, at all, is like keeping a rattlesnake as a pet, slithering through the house.  No private citizen has any legitimate need for a gun.  To keep any kind of weapon shows unspeakably vile judgment.  Why should innocent children die so that these inbred vermin can keep assault weapons?  So goes the Piers Morgan argument.

Was Newtown a tragedy?  Certainly.  No one wants to be callous and say that these deaths didn’t matter.  They certainly matter to the parents and families of the victims.  But as dramatic and tragic as these shootings are, the fact remains that the vast majority of gun deaths in this country are due to suicides, not mass killing sprees.  Moreover, this ignores what the NRA could tell you in the National Rifleman each month:  ordinary people can and do use firearms to legitimately protect themselves and their families – far more lives saved by responsible gun owners (more so than even the police) than lost by crazy maniacs or criminals. 

The Type B’s assaulting us are not getting their weapons directly from gun sellers.  It looks like they get their weapons from Type A’s in their same household.  This woman in Connecticut knew her son was a wackjob but still kept guns in the house; appropriately she was the first victim of his killing spree.

What I, and most gun rights advocates, find annoying is this vague demand that “something should be done”.  What would that be?  “More gun control.”  Please be more specific.   And let’s be clear about this:  instantaneously eliminating ALL guns from the US is NOT a realistic option short of… I don’t know…MAGIC???   And expecting gun owners (of either type) to simply cough up their weapons?  Not going to happen.  Forget it.   We’re either going to shoot them at you or hide them somewhere.  

Fact:  Any gun control policy initiative has to take as a given assumption that no matter how hard we try to ban or eliminate weapons, it is IMPOSSIBLE to completely disarm the entire country.  Like it or not, some people are going to have weapons, and many of those people are going to be Type B’s who we’d prefer were unarmed.

So what exactly are they proposing?

A complete ban on firearms across the entire country?  This blatant violation of the Second Amendment would not withstand Supreme Court scrutiny and would require a repeal of the Second Amendment, which in turn requires more political capital than even the Newtown tragedy could elicit.  Even if, SOMEHOW, it could be pushed through Congress AND survive judicial review, it would still not do anything about the millions of guns already in circulation.  In the short term it would dramatically boost gun sales in the months leading up to its going into effect, which would seem to be somewhat counterproductive.  Moreover, even when it did go into effect, it would only prevent Type A’s from acquiring weapons.

To the extent Type B’s are getting their guns from Type A’s in the same household, I’d say some restriction on that would be the only sensible “gun control” anyone could propose.  If you’re a Type A gun owner, you have some responsibility to secure your weapons to make sure Type B’s do not get access to them.  Gun safes, gun locks, etc. are all options.  How about that business in the movies where a closet or panel opens up to reveal the guns hanging up on the wall – maybe IKEA has some ideas for that.  Let’s try a little harder to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people, without depriving Type A’s of their lawfully and peacefully owned weapons – regardless of whether those weapons are hunting rifles or “assault rifles” with high capacity magazines. 

Another problem are Type A’s who purchase their guns legally while sane and normal, and then descend into Type B neighborhood later.  Anyone who loses their job and family and goes off the deep end could rapidly turn from a well-adjusted, normal person to a crazy disgruntled maniac in a matter of months or even weeks.  But most Type A’s tend to remain Type A’s.  I would argue that any attempt to disqualify someone from gun ownership after the fact due to such an onset of diminished capacity should put the burden on the party attempting to revoke gun ownership rather than on the party seeking to keep his/her weapons.

Some gun rights advocates, e.g. Mr. Pratt (for all his causticness and animosity, itself a reaction to Morgan’s arrogance and contempt, he is right about this point) have attracted contempt and scorn for making the following observation:  these massacres consistently occur in places where guns are prohibited.  “How can MORE guns be the answer????”  It’s as obvious to me as it was to Mr. Pratt:  If the killer knows his “audience” is unarmed, he has no deterrent.  Arming elementary school children is obviously silly, but arming the teachers and school staff is considerably less ludicrous.  But that’s a downstream solution.  The upstream solution, as noted above, is restricting the flow of guns from Type A’s to Type B’s.

Look at drunk driving: every year hundreds of people are killed in automobile accidents, either due to their own negligence or that of others.  Clearly, in the wrong hands, a car is a deadly weapon.  The same could also be said of a jumbo jet flown into the Pentagon or World Trade Center.  But no one is proposing to ban cars or air travel simply because people have been known to die of these causes.  There is no reason why guns should be any different.  It’s simply UNFAIR that innocent, responsible gun owners who have never murdered a child should be punished and otherwise held responsible for what a handful of dangerous nutjobs do with guns.  Two wrongs do not make a right. 

Finally, one possible problem is political.  A local sheriff might seek to classify his buddies as Type A’s and everyone else as Type B’s, or some similar attempt to inhibit or interfere with gun rights not based on a legitimate fear of imminent meltdown or catastrophe but rather a principled objection to private gun ownership per se, a blanket conviction that there are no “Type A’s”, period.  This “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” is the #1 fear of gun owners in the wake of Newton-type massacres.  But again, any attempt to disarm the entire country will be a messy affair.