Guns: The American Plague

The violence in Oregon has generated all the expected noise and all of it is about the wrong solution. Everyone wants to blame the whole problem on crazy people because that’s easy. They all speak about background checks as if that would solve the problem. Not that there is much chance of getting these oft mentioned background checks passed by a congress that trembles at the very mention of the NRA. The gun lobby and the NRA have shown a pretty strong ability to fend off even the most pathetic of challenges to their ability to arm every man woman and child in the country and by doing so, to make huge profits. Because profit is really what the gun question is about. If Winchester or Remington couldn’t make hundreds of millions in profit each year on our national obsession with guns they wouldn’t give a rats ass about the Second Amendment.

Every time some maniac walks into a school and blows away a dozen or more kids, Wayne LaPierre, President of the NRA leans across his desk and presses a button that alerts an army of degenerate press managers, bottom feeding lawyers and congressmen looking for a boost in their campaign funding; all of whom jump into the fray and divert the just anger of those who are tired of their children being killed so the big gun companies can make a bigger profit. Big weaponry has only one goal in life, profit, and they earn that profit by selling guns to people who are the potential killers of your kids. If you don’t see that, you are too dumb to be in the conversation.

Despite all the outcry about terrorism, we actually kill thousands more of our own people every year than do terrorists but we are spending billions on Homeland security and nothing on gun control. How do you suppose that happened?

Of course that happens because we are ignoring the real issue. The real issue is you can’t do any job without the proper tool and when you want to shoot someone, the proper tool is a gun. You don’t want me to cut down that tree, you take away my ax and my saw, you don’t want me to shoot your kid, you take away my gun.

We have, in this country, for a number of years, stopped people from blowing each other up. How did we do that? We restricted explosives. As a former FFL, licensed to sell guns and explosives I have a fairly extensive knowledge of that subject. We call them gun deaths because they are accomplished with guns. Without the gun there would be an enormous reduction in violent deaths in this country, Guns make it easy. Very few people are willing to engage another with any weapon but a gun. The distance that a gun allows, gives the cowardly killer a sense of well-being. None of the school shootings would have happened, none of them, without the presence of a gun. You can talk about background checks and mental health restrictions and all the other crap until your tongue falls out, but gun control will never be successful until we remove the guns from the nuts and just about everyone else. Not one piece of legislation will be functional as long as we have guns available to those that want to kill.

Americans love guns. You watch a group of little kids playing and even if they don’t have guns they are shooting at each other using sticks, a finger, whatever they have available. No guns, no gun deaths. That’s a simple logical fact.

People will still get murdered but it will be a miniscule fraction of the number now. Ask the Australians. They did it. They took away the guns and now they have almost no gun deaths in their country.

So how do we deal with this tool of death? Probably the first thing we have to do is to interpret the second amendment correctly, the way it was always interpreted up until about seven years ago when the gun lobby convinced the willing members of the Supreme Court that it meant something that it was never meant to mean.

The Second Amendment was written for a very specific situation in a world that no longer exists. It speaks directly to the people having to have guns, so they could serve in the militia and protect a country that had almost no standing army. That’s no longer the case. We have the biggest standing army in the history of the world. The only militias we have are made up of nutcase white supremacists and for those who want something in between there is the national guard which conveniently supplies its members with guns from the government. The current interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of convenience for those who wish to sell or bear arms. It has nothing to do with reality.

So let’s not kid ourselves. There is no legitimate necessity for people other than cops to have guns. There are, however, some very strong desires, so let’s deal with those. There are people who want to hunt, there are people who want to protect their homes, especially in rural regions and there are collectors, just to name a few.

I grew up a hunter. I was taught to shoot by my uncle, a colonel in the army. In order to be allowed to shoot a gun, my cousins and I, first had to learn gun safety and then be able to show my uncle that we knew how to handle a weapon and how to shoot it. The weapon of choice in our family was a Winchester single shot 30-30. Why such a limited weapon? Because if you couldn’t kill a deer, which is all we hunted, with a single shot, you wouldn’t be hunting on my uncle’s land. Hunting is not a frivolous sport. It’s a dangerous activity with a necessarily high skill level and those who do not have those skills should not be allowed to play. No qualified hunter needs an automatic weapon and no serious hunter, hunts with a pistol. I should also mention that the only acceptable reason to hunt is to feed the family. People who just like to kill things for fun, are our next serial killers.

Then there’s the, protect the home people. This can be a legitimate need, but there is only one weapon that is functional for protecting the home. I’m talking about a double barrel shotgun. It’s messy but it’s damn near foolproof. Most people who want to protect their homes aren’t trained gunners and most of them can’t hit the broadside of a barn from inside, so this is or should be, the weapon of choice. It’s a point and shoot weapon, that in close range makes it almost impossible to miss the bad guy but it’s destructive enough to make one think twice before pulling a trigger inside a room full of art or even clean furniture. Almost any other gun will guarantee that in repelling the intruder you will shoot a least one member of your immediate family, if not yourself.

So outside of a single shot 30-30 or a double barrel shot gun there is no reason for anyone to own a weapon in this country. No reason but many desires. “I’m a collector,” shouts one guy with a basement full of artillery. “I’m in the security field,” whines another one. Well, if there are no guns on the street then you don’t need one to do your job and the answer to no guns on the street is a draconian penalty for the illegal sale or possession of them.

Legitimate gun collectors, and there are really very few of them, would have to comply with some strong measures, just like car collectors only stronger. As it is,, if our gun licensing laws were as strong as our auto licensing laws we would already have a hell of a lot less problems. A license, a test and insurance should all be part of every state’s laws.

No one, not one single person in this country needs an automatic rifle or machine gun. The only reason for their ownership is an anatomical lack of extension and what most find out; is that owning an M16 does not solve the problem.

Because our congressional representatives are both cowardly and bought, we will never get a piece of legislation banning all guns passed into law so the only possibility is through a national referendum. To get that, we will need a president or some very powerful legislator to lead a national movement to collect and destroy all the guns. Remember, they did it in Australia.

We have a mess of laws relating to gun control already on the books. Some bunch of kids get shot and all the liberals get together and try to change a couple of commas in this or that law and accomplish squat. The NRA lays some cash on a certain congressman’s re-election campaigns or some Right Wing senator ends up with a yacht and it all goes away. The fact of the matter is, as long as we have to deal with a well paid off, and voter hungry congress nothing will happen there. The majority of people in this country are against the unlimited use of guns. Let’s find out if the majority would like to see guns eliminated entirely and if that’s the case, let’s move ahead to that end.

Right now, with elections coming up, it’s open season for presidential candidates to come up with bizarre gun theories that often boggle the mind. Ben Carson was quoted the other day as saying that if more Germans had been able to carry guns Hitler would never have been able to kill six million Jews. Maybe – or maybe he just would have had more help. This guy is supposed to have been a very good brain surgeon. Maybe he should have operated on himself before he uttered some of the dumbest stuff ever said by a human being.

Bumbling Ben Carson aside, stronger gun laws aren’t the answer. With stronger gun laws, the only people who will have guns will be the bad guys because they don’t care about laws. The point is, you don’t regulate the guns; you remove them entirely from the equation and create draconian penalties for those who possess them.

Many make the case that if someone in one of these multiple slayings had a gun then the killer might not have gotten off as many shots as he did. I counter that; A- if someone else had a gun, there would probably be at least a half dozen more bodies. And; B- if the guns weren’t available at all, the principle shooter wouldn’t have had one and the chances of him going into a school with a knife and looking to commit mass murder would be about zero.

It has already been established above that it takes more licensing to own and drive a car than it does to own and shoot a gun. Those who would debunk that idea say that driving isn’t a right in the constitution. It isn’t in the constitution because cars didn’t exist then and using the same 250 year-old document to justify your right to own guns now, is just as illogical.