Of course, that’s just as absurd a statement as many others that are spouted out in the gun control debate.
Do guns become animate and start firing by themselves? Perhaps sensor-controlled ones would, but fortunately there aren’t many of those around, certainly not in movie theatres and schools, thank goodness. It’s what’s on the other end of the trigger finger that’s responsible, surely?
The above was prompted by reading Data suggest guns do in fact kill people in the online version of The Economist. This article concludes:
“It's really not terribly shocking that making it harder to get your hands on machines designed to kill people results in fewer people being killed. But we've worked very hard over the past few decades to convince ourselves otherwise.”
Go read the article and ponder the arguments for and against gun control.
Of course guns put holes in things (people, deer, paper, etc)..that's what they're designed to do (I would argue they're not designed to kill people, but they certainly can accomplish that). The problem is we've lost the desire for personal accountability, and we want to blame things. Why didn't we have these issues 50yrs ago? My father-in-law took his 22 rifle to school regularly on the bus, and nobody batted an eye (they got dropped off at a buddy's on the way home and would go hunting for squirrels. The rifle was kept in the back of the classroom).
ReplyDeleteA kid shoots someone, internet transports that news everywhere, and suddenly we have an issue. Yesterday a kid was accused of killing his teacher with a box cutter in the US. How many folks die from the affects of alcohol (hint: more than guns), yet there's no talk of further regulating those. Can an insane person buy a fifth of vodka and kill people with their car? Sure, happens weekly. How many times does a DUI hit the front page of google? I largely eat venison all year, so my firearms have a legit use. How many times have you used alcohol for a productive cause?
We like to pretend we're safe. We like to make further laws that we think will stop bad people from doing bad things. Good luck with that. In the meantime, leave me alone.