The Batman Massacre in Colorado reminds
liberals like me how nice it would be if access to guns was better
controlled in the United States. It would probably take fifty years
to get some control over the enormous quantity of firearms in
circulation, but hey, if we had started exercising control in 1950,
by now we would have made some progress.
If you are hoping that massacres like
this will change the way Americans view gun ownership, forget it.
Even liberals have to measure the damage guns do against our
country's gold standard: automobile deaths.
We love automobiles in the USA. We
drive them everywhere, at a cost of 30,000 deaths per year. (It used
to be worse, over 50,000 in 1978.) Gun deaths are harder to record
and count, but they seem to be in the same ballpark, with some estimates as low as 30,000 per year.
The bottom line is very simple. Let us
Americans do what we want. Collateral damage on the order of 0.01% of
our innocent men, women, children and babies is a decent price to
pay. Multi-car accidents, where a few dozen cars smash into each
other, don't make the national news headlines. Why should a demented
shooter?
3 comments:
Um. I can't tell if this post was intended ironcially. But in case it wasn't I'll mention the following: the return on auto operation is enormous. Imagine, for example the fact that virtually everything in your house got there via at least one truck.
I won't deny that there is some value in personal gun ownership, but it couldn't possibly rival the return on autos.
To drive the point home, I'll mention that eating and sex both account for far more deaths than either guns or autos..
-jg
The irony (at lest to my vision) seems to drip like the grease from a double bacon cheeseburger.
Ummm, bacon.
But seriously, I cannot but see the "rational and balanced" demands for gun control as anything but an incremental first step towards total gun banishment. History teaches us no less, and the lessons of history are Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, every damn one of whom started gun control as a "reasonable, measured" reaction to domestic violence.
JC, I think you are seeing what you want to see. If I wanted to figure out what will happen in the United States, the last thing I would guess is that we will follow the actions of Mao, Stalin and Hitler.
You do not need to protect yourself from similar despots! You live in the USA.
Our government has regulated many things for many years. They have not stopped us from eating by regulating food. They have not stopped us from TV by regulating the airwaves. And they regulate cars heavily, but not in order to take them away from us.
- PB
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