Today I had an interesting discussion with myself (sup, only child) about a topic a lot of people have been talking about recently. With the mass shootings in Aurora (about 20 minutes away from where I sit now), Oregon, Wisconsin and now Newtown Connecticut (about 30 minutes away from where I grew up), there is a renewed fervor for gun control. The discussion I had with myself was complicated. I am a right leaning pragmatist, and I enjoy shooting shit that doesn't know its name, however I do not hold the party line with the NRA or any of the survivalist groups that think if the Federal Government gets a little snippy with its citizens, our second amendment rights will be enough to keep it in line. Perhaps guns don't kill people, perhaps people kill people, but perhaps the gun helps. As Eddie Izzard said in his famous 1998 comedy special "Dressed to Kill" (predating Columbine by a few months) "I think [the gun] helps. I just think just standing there going, 'Bang!' That's not going to kill too many people, is it? You'd have to be really dodgy on the heart to have that…”
In order to get anywhere on this discussion, I feel it necessary to extrapolate both arguments in my own completely arbitrary way. Let's start with full on gun control, how does that look in 50 years if we ban the sale of all guns today? Well, let's look at other illegal things that people like to have. We all know about prohibition, which turned bootlegging into organized crime into Goodfellas into one of my favorite TV shows of the late 90's early 2000's, the Sopranos (Woke up this morning/Got yourself a gun). OK, that one didn't go so well. How about drugs? Besides the fact that I'm sitting in Denver right now, elsewhere in our country Marijuana is illegal, yet people still find a way to smoke up. Some places more than others. You would be hard pressed to find anyone that feels the War on Drugs has been a success. The current violence in Mexico is strongly linked to cartels battling each other and law enforcement for control over the major drug pipelines. Anyone want to take a trip to Tijuana to see the Donkey Show? Well my pasty white skin makes me a prime target for machete swinging practice, so I think I'll pass.
So banning those things didn't go so well. "But you can't compare apples to oranges! Drugs can be easily concealed and guns are cumbersome and in much less demand! No one has ever gone on methadone for a gun addiction!" Try telling that to Ted Nugent! Or anyone within 300 miles of an SEC football stadium! The point is, banning things doesn't get rid of them. If we banned all guns today, in 50 years we would still have several orders of magnitude more guns than Japan or England or Sweden, you know why? Because you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. People have guns, the government can't go around confiscating them because the numbers are just too gaudy. People are also used to having guns, so they will subvert the law in the newly furnished black market. Perhaps in 3 or 4 generations things would get better, as the redneck factor worked its way out of the gene pool via quad related accidents. But that doesn't help the children in Newtown, or the moviegoers in Aurora, or the students of Virginia Tech.
Now let's go the other way, what happens if we hang on to status quo and do nothing about gun control. The second amendment has been around since the Bill of Rights was signed in 1789 (enacted 1791) so let's just round that to 220 years. So the short answer is probably nothing would happen. Maybe we as a nation never reach that critical mass number where enough people have been directly affected by gun violence to force a change, as we haven't to this point. Maybe some people move to countries with less guns, and maybe the rest of the world lords their superior morality over our heads, but what else is new. One thing is for sure, we will still live in relative fear.
I went and saw the Dark Knight Rises a week after the shooting, and I realized if someone opened fire in the IMAX theater I was in (with 1.21 gigawatts of surround sound) I would have very little in the ways of a reaction until it was probably too late. I just don't know if that's a problem in London, or Stockholm, or Tokyo. The common thread to all these mass shootings is someone went nuts. Schizophrenia commonly manifests in a person's early 20's, and while I'm no doctor or psychologist, I just have to imagine that some form of mental illness precedes shooting a classroom full of 6-year-olds. With that being said, is it easier or more difficult for a person suffering from psychotic behavior to obtain a high capacity fire arm in a place where gun ownership is perfectly legal, or a place where fire arms are banned?
Many people vilify the NRA for their non-budging stance on gun control. The fact is, there's plenty of precedent suggesting that any legislation against your cause snowballs into banning your cause outright in short order. This is the principle of "zero sum games", one side cannot win without the other losing. This was the principle employed during trench warfare. We needed to surge and die for the literal inch of dirt, because that's an inch of dirt the enemy no longer has. The NRA has taken a look at other battles that were fought and lost by unpopular lobbies. Take smoking, I'm old enough to remember when smoking in restaurants was perfectly ok. I also remember the subsequent transitions to smoking sections in restaurants, then only smoking in the bar, then only outside, and now smokers are forced into little shaming areas several feet from the establishment. This was a battle fought and lost by the tobacco lobby, and the NRA watched and took notes. Hence their refusal to relent on assault weapons, which many NRA members in a moment of honesty may say have no intrinsic value to the legitimate uses of fire-arms over shotguns, pistols and hunting rifles. But giving up assault weapons means to them eventually giving up the rest, just ask the smokers.
So back to my extrapolation of the current status quo, the NRA would most likely say "in 50 years we would be in the exact same place we are now, free to own guns as was constitutionally guaranteed by our founding fathers". And they might be right, but are we possibly citizens of a different world than the founding fathers were? I would argue emphatically yes. I smoked a lot of pot in college, so this information might not be as accurate as I want it to be, but a quick survey of my personal belongings does not include the following: a slave, a musket, a powdered wig, a plantation or a healthy hatred of the Royal British Army. That's because I was born in the 1980's, not the 1780's. Our world is vastly different now, and a gun is not a part of my every day life. I very much understand people who hunt, it is one of the hobbies I would very much like to get into later in life. And I also understand people who want to defend their homes and their families against intruders who are also able to wield guns. This legislation would not come without sacrifices, and those legitimate uses of guns would be the collateral damage. Is that too much to sacrifice? Maybe so, I tend to err on the side of sovereignty. One place we can start however is how we go about treating mental illness in this country. Like I said, no one shoots a room full of 6-year-olds without some severe mental illness. But that's a discussion for another time.
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