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It turns out that I have been a little naive about gun control.A hostile comment on Comedy Central points out that fully automatic assault weapons have been outlawed since 1934, and Wikipedia corroborates this. It appears that to follow the progress and the failures of gun control one has to be an expert on guns.
In 1994, a ban on a certain category of assault weapon was enacted and passed under the presidency of Bill Clinton, but the law had a 10-year sunset provision, and thus expired (presumably in 2004). Evidently weapon manufacturers were able to circumvent the law by making very minor alterations in the features of their weapons, this making them fall technically under the category of allowed weapons. It was argued that weapons manufacturers could not reasonably be held to a standard higher than the law itself.
So, to be effective, a law has to anticipate all measures that gun manufacturers might take to circumvent its application. This is like having to spell out what it means to kill somebody. Reading the gun laws in Wikipedia (look under Federal Assault Weapons Ban, Gun Laws, and Gun Politics) was a painfully difficult undertaking, since the amount of technical detail was oppressive, especially to one who is uninterested in guns except to get rid of the bloody things.
As is typical with Wikipedia articles on contentious subjects, the articles mentioned above have been written by multiple authors with evidently conflicting viewpoints, and, in many cases, limited language skills, resulting in convoluted grammar that is often difficult to follow, and occasionally positively misleading. One thing is clear: writing skill and interest in firearms do not go together. A clear, uncluttered article on the present state of gun control from the National perspective, with a clear definition of gun categories, would be very useful. It is useless to include the interested parties, since pro-gun groups have proliferated over the years (the NRA, the GOA, the Pink Pistols), and some have supported some measures, and opposed others, and become merely an additional layer of confusion on top of everything else. The delight that gun fanciers have in talking about stocks and spent cartridges and tumbling projectiles would be amusing, if the issues were not so horrific. It is a dirty business, jealously protected by many dangerous people, but sane people must get into it, or gun violence will continue to escalate.
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3 comments:
You try to mentally put yourself in the place of a gun owner, but you do not grasp the view of the large majority. You base your ideas of their view based upon the arguments, but you don’t comprehend why we come up with those arguments. We don’t think that those arguments are the primary basis for owning guns. We point to those arguments as a valid and logical reason for owning them. Our logic regarding the situation is a far more basic than that. And it covers a far greater list of subjects than just guns. Guns are just one of the many things that result from the basic logic in question.
It all comes down to trust. Do you trust your fellow man. Does the government trust it’s citizens.
If you have inherent trust in your fellow citizens, then the debate over gun ownership, car ownership, or whatever ownership is moot. Guns are not even the primary factor in the question of inherent trust.
In today’s world guns are not exactly complicated pieces of equipment. On the Mechanical evolution timeline, they are closer to a sledge hammer than they are to a jet plane. There is things that can be far more lethal than guns, that are used every day. If I trust someone operating a crane in my vicinity, or driving a truck down the road that I am standing by, then I am putting more trust in them than I would be if I let them have a firearm in my presence. Any one of them could end my life with a flick of a control, or swerve of a wheel. I am putting my life in their hands in any case.
When I grew up, I became familiar with guns as tools, nothing more, nothing less. There was always one by the back door, in case a coyote come out of the woods and tried to attack the dogs, or cats. I was never told that a gun was anything special. You don’t hit someone over the head with a hammer, and you don’t point a gun at something you don’t want to shoot. At the tender age of around 10 years old, we was moving stuff from one closet to another. My older sisters were helping. When I come back around in the line, a shotgun was there, as the next thing to move. I lifted it out of the corner, pointed the barrel to the floor and hit the barrel break lever to open it up and make sure it was unloaded, then I carried it to the other closet. Even though I had never personally shot one, I knew exactly what it was for and what it could do. The exhilaration of handling a gun didn’t cross my mind. I took as much interest in it as I would of if it was a pneumatic nail gun. No one taught me gun safety, I wasn’t lectured on them. I knew what they was and people assumed I was smart enough to figure out what not to do with one. Just like them assuming that I would be smart enough to know that I shouldn’t hit my sister over the head with a hammer.
If a child can’t figure out that it is wrong to hit someone over the head with a hammer, or can’t figure out that it is wrong to shoot someone with a real gun, or can’t figure out that you have to handle dangerous items with precaution, then the problem isn’t the hammer or the gun, it is the failure of the parents and school system that raised the child.
(cont...)
When a neighbor brags to me about a new rifle or handgun he bought, he brags about it in the same way he would brag about a new sawzaw he got from a hardware store. He doesn’t brag because it makes him feel like powerful force that can put the government in it’s place. He brags about it because it is a finally crafted mechanical device that does what it is designed to do with accuracy and precision. Like a person would brag to his friends about a new light weight nail gun that can plant nails as fast as you can pull the trigger.
That is why the whole gun control movement jus perplexes me as an average citizen. If it’s not safe for people to own guns, then there is many other things out there that the government needs to restrict access to. The UK is taking it to the extreme. They have a knife ban.
That exemplifies the lack of trust. If you can not trust you citizens with a piece of metal that is sharpened on one end, then you have no trust in them at all!
And trying to ban, and restrict access to knives, or guns is just as stupid as trying to restrict access to guns. In a modern industrialized nation it is basic technology. Anyone with basic machining technology can make all three. The technology has been available and widely known for countless years. you can’t make a technology disappear. Give me a machine shop and I could turn out a rifle or handgun within a day, even though I have never made one in my life.
The basic thing is…… Killing is wrong. And illegal. It doesn’t mater if it was done with a car, truck, hammer, knife, gun, bomb, or even a pneumatic nail gun!, The implement used to do the crime is irrelevant. The crime is the same.
If they can’t find one implement to do the crime, then they will use another. If they can’t even find a rock to throw at someone, then they will throw the person over the cliff. If they can’t find somewhere to throw them off of, then they will learn how to kill someone with their bare hands.
It’s like Japan. If guns caused suicides. Then why does Japan have almost double the suicide rate of the US even though they have almost no gun related deaths. The people there just find other ways to kill themselves. Guns are just tools, if there is no gun handy, then they will just pick another tool. Who hasn’t used a wrench as a makeshift hammer?
It all comes back to trust. If the government doesn’t trust it’s citizens, then it doesn’t indicate a problem with the citizens, it indicates a basic problem with the government. The people that makeup the government has become isolated from the people they represent. They look on their own constituents as outsiders, instead of viewing themselves as one of the very people they represent. To think they know better than everyone else, shows an arrogance that is unacceptable.
I look at a government that tries to restrict the average citizen’s ownership of things with heavy suspicion. Just as I oppose the light bulb ban. Just as I oppose the ban of mercury vapor lights. Just as I oppose bans on fireworks. I also oppose restrictions on basic tools like knives and firearms. Just as I oppose the ban on alcohol stills (even though I have never consumed alcohol in my life) The government doesn’t have a right to regulate such things. If they try, then it gives indication that there is ulterior motives. Those ulterior motives is what I worry about.
It is the basic logic that forms my world view. It is all about trust. Guns is just a small part of it.
Ben< Well, you seem to say that if guns were not available, little kids who want to exterminate their classmates are going to have to use power staplers to do it?
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