December 17, 2012
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Why is it so hard to talk about guns in America?
JDN 2456279 EDT 18:57.
The Connecticut school shooting, which you’ve no doubt heard plenty about already, is but the most recent in a long series of wanton shooting massacres that have been occurring in the United States for just about as long as the United States has existed. Thousands of people have died this way.
And no, this is not inevitable. In fact, most countries don’t have this problem at all. The US is an outlier in the First World in terms of its homicide rate and especially gun homicide rate. There are other nations that have higher homicide rates, but none among highly-developed nations. The US homicide rate is about 50 per million per year, while most First World nations have rates nearer to 20 per million and Japan’s is as low as 3 per million.
Clearly, there are a lot of things that could be contributing to this. The US has more poverty, poorer health care (especially mental health care), more inequality, and more racism than most other First World nations. But we also have… less gun regulation.
It’s not as simple as saying we have more guns: Canada has lots of guns, and in Switzerland every able-bodied male is required to be in the military and own an assault rifle. What we have is instead less regulation of guns, so it’s easier for people to get high-powered weapons without background checks, waiting periods, or restrictions. I’ve literally been in a gas station (near where an ex-boyfriend lived in northern Michigan) that has, on the wall, for sale, a PS-90 submachine gun. It was locked to disallow full-automatic fire (hence the PS instead of just P)… but this should be little comfort, as they are plenty dangerous in semi-automatic and are not too difficult to modify to restore full-automatic capability. In case you didn’t know, the P-90 in unlocked form is a military-grade weapon used primarily by special forces. A P-90 is not for hunting Odocoileus virginianus; it is for hunting Homo sapiens.
Ironically, it is illegal for civilians to own tasers in most states, including Michigan. But I could have put this PS-90 on my credit card and brought it home, probably the same day. Is this because tasers are dangerous? They certainly are dangerous… but not nearly as dangerous as guns! Tasers are designed to stun, and in rare cases they can cause permanent damage or death. Guns are designed to kill, and they do it well.
For those who want to use the Second Amendment: Do you really think you can defend against the government with guns? They have aircraft carriers, drones and helicopter gunships. If the US government wants you dead, you’re pretty much going to be dead. Your best hope of preventing that comes through civic action, not some fanatic last stand with your gas station P-90. Weapons divide us, and they make civic action harder, not easier, as Firmin Debrabander cogently explains. A Twitter post is worth a thousand bullets, as the Arab Spring clearly showed.
Unfortunately, there are too many gun nuts in America, people who honestly think (despite the clear evidence to the contrary) that owning a gun makes you safer. The fact is, you’re more likely to kill yourself, or get involved in an accident, than you are to successfully defend yourself. There’s even some evidence that owning a gun makes violent situations escalate–what would have been theft or assault now becomes homicide. Most gun owners have a deeply skewed notion of how crime works.
These are not matters of opinion. They are not complex moral dilemmas. They are objective facts.
But something happened in America, I’m not sure when: Conservatives became immune to facts. And that terrifies me more than anything.
Comments (7)
Pass it around……Guns don’t solve problems, people do!
i cannot rec this enough. i’m STILL arguing with gun nuts who seem to think that the solution is to arm everyone.
Why is it so hard? Why are the gun owners are so irrationally defensive … who wins, and what do they win? Is it only for the interest of wealthy gun manufacturers? TRue, there are people, especially in southwestern drug corridors of the US, who can legitimately say their survival depends on packing a loaded gun. Most do not agree.
For the parents of small children, gun control is no longer an issue to be ignored. It is foremost in the national dialog. The facile NRA talking points will not flourish.
Hi! I came across your blog through Xanga and your blog was in the top 30 or something to that effect. I read your blog and up until the second to the last paragraph, I had no qualms with what you said. Meaning that I didn’t disagree with what you said but the second to the last paragraph was the one that I found that I can’t really agree with.
In particular, I meant this: [Unfortunately, there are too many gun nuts in America, people who honestly think (despite the clear evidence to the contrary) that owning a gun makes you safer. The fact is, you're more likely to kill yourself, or get involved in an accident, than you are to successfully defend yourself. There's even some evidence that owning a gun makes violent situations escalate--what would have been theft or assault now becomes homicide. Most gun owners have a deeply skewed notion of how crime works.]
The links you provided and articles within those links seem to hint that there are “risks” involved and that the PROBABILITY of owning a gun and thus its associated risk rises when one owns one as opposed not to owning one. Okay, I got that. But at best, you’ve only illustrated that it is ‘more likely’ to be the case that you’d be safer without a gun but it doesn’t establish it as a fact. That’s the only bit I have qualms with your blog but other than that, I don’t disagree with what you’ve said so far.
Part of the problem is that while there’s been some rigorous work on the problem of gun violence (also here), the gun lobby has managed to suppress efforts to expand it (also here). So unlike other societal problems, where over time a body of hard research accumulates that can be used to guide and evaluate public policy decisions, the basic facts are still a bit murky in this area. Which creates space for uninformed nuts with a hardon to be like Dirty Harry or the kids in Red Dawn to opine away just as well as anyone else. I wouldn’t call that bunch proper conservatives, either; as far as I can tell, their focus, on more than one issue, can be summed up as “me, mine, what’s coming to me,” and not the role and duties and of a responsible individual within society—which was the thing that was supposed to be wrong with the countercultural left a few decades ago.
@TomTea -
As you’ll note from the very sentence you quoted, more likely is exactly the phrasing I used. It’s always about statistics; there is no perfectly safe choice, only more-safe and less-safe choices. Not owning a gun is the more-safe choice.
On the first point, fair enough.
On the second point: Statistics are, well, just statistics. It’s a general sample of the population of whatever point one wants to prove or disprove that’s supposed to be representative of the whole population. I think it is fair to say that those who are on the pro-gun side could just as easily pull out statistics from some national newspaper, science article, etc., that proves otherwise. So if I’m a third person from the outside looking in at two opposing sides, who am I to believe is the correct one since both sides can easily pull out statistics that prove each other wrong?
From my stand point, your basic argument is this: Not owning a gun is, relatively speaking, the more-safe choice because of this national/state newspaper article that says that those who own guns are statistically at higher risk of injuring oneself/others, or whatever the study claims. Therefore, because the national/state newspaper says so, not owning the guy is the more-safe choice. Sounds like a circular argument to me.
What I don’t get is how you went from statistically probable to objective fact. Can you, perhaps, clarify that for me?