Guns don’t kill people, people kill people
But guns certainly make it easier.
Like most people living Asia, I woke up to the morning news and the first RSS feed I read was on the Virginia Tech shooting, the worst of its kind in American history. I think it’s about time some people get it through their thick skulls that private ownership of guns is a stupid thing. I am disturbed that any emotionally unstable teen can pick up a gun from his father’s locker and kill. I am disgusted that Republican politicians like Mitt Romney have to suck up to the NRA to please the conservative voters. I think the Second Amendment is a good idea badly conveyed and horribly misinterpreted.
Read on for why.
The founding fathers assumed that power corrupts and a government always requires checks and balances to remain true to the people’s interest. For that purpose, the people must have the ability to rise against an oppressive government should the need arise and thus the need for private ownership of guns. This might have been effective two hundred years ago when everyone used wooden musket guns and it didn’t take a lot of effort to burn down the White House, but today it is absurd to think that any private militia can have the firepower to match the US military’s cutting-edge technology and astronomical budget. Does anyone seriously believe that keeping a pistol by your bedside will help you if someone decided to turn America into a theocratic dictatorship? Unless you are Laura Bush, the answer is definitely “no”.
And that is exactly why no other functional democracies in the world relies on private gun ownership as a safeguard against a corrupted government. Instead they rely on dividing the power among different branches of the government and on an educated and well-informed population. If the day comes when it becomes necessary for the people to overthrow the government by force, then democracy has already failed. Are advocates of gun ownership saying that democracy in America is so screwed up and unreliable that such an arrangement is really called for, in spite of the innumerable negative effects it has on society? What a huge insult to the system that is the pride of so many Americans.
Not only does private gun ownership contribute absolutely nothing to in today’s democracies, it brings about a boatload of otherwise avoidable social problems. Some people feel unsafe without a gun for self defence because they would otherwise stand no chance against an armed criminal. But the irony is that the criminal is armed only because he too is allowed to possess firearms under the same set of laws. These gun right advocates claim that if gun control laws are passed, then honest citizens will be robbed of their right to self defence while the criminals continue to arm themselves with black market guns. But they are wrong. With proper law enforcement, criminals will have access to less guns than before and ultimately the number of gun-related violent crimes will drop. It is selfish for people to keep guns to protect themselves at the expense of public safety because it creates a harmful environment where guns are more easily obtainable.
Also, it is important to note that carrying a gun does not necessarily mean you are safer. If an armed man robs me, I will give up my valuables and stand a good chance of walking away from the encounter alive, because the goal of the robber is money and generally it is wiser to avoid killing and causing unnecessary trouble. On the other hand, if I respond by pulling out a gun, the situation changes and one of two things happen: I shoot him or he shoots me. Either way, someone will die.
Guns make killing all to easy. You can be walking home from work and end up getting shot by a drunk and bored teenager, or attending lessons when your classmate who just got dumped by his girlfriend pulls out a gun and shoot you. The people committing these murders are not members of organized criminal syndicates, they are emotionally unstable stupid teenagers who have an all-too-easy access to legally-purchased guns. Maybe mafia mobsters will continue to have access to black market guns even after gun control laws are passed, but at least these idiots will not. If the laws are enforced by a competent police force, and yet a criminal manages to obtain a gun illegally without getting caught, then clearly he possesses a higher level of intelligence and self discipline than the Columbine shooters.
And without guns, what will crazy nut jobs do in the spur of the moment when caught in a heated argument that they just can’t win with words alone? The worst they can do is to stab the other party with a knife. If they can even figure out how. Maybe they will succeed killing one person, but you can bet that it will not be 32 people. In a society that allows private gun ownership, the sanctity of life is cheapened to a trigger squeeze.
Knives, baseball bats, metal rods, golf clubs, lengths of rope, glass shards, rocks and, yes, even guns can kill people. The difference is that guns do it too well to be allowed in the hands of the untrained and undisciplined masses. Police officers and soldiers are duty bound and professionally responsible for their actions, it’s what they are trained to do. The average emo teenager on LJ is neither. I’m not saying that it is impossible for a trained soldier to loss his cool and commit murder, but I think it’s obvious which one is more likely to cause the next record-breaking campus shooting.
…But I guess freedom and liberty and whatnot is more important than going to school without having to pass through metal detectors. Whenever will some people learn to see what is true freedom?
stun guns for non lethal self defense. Stun guns are an inexpensive and effective means to protect yourself. Legal almost everywhere.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
As a buddy put it best:
“Virginia Tech is a “gun-free zone”, but I guess no one told the guy who killed 30+ people that. It’s too bad that one of those teachers or students wasn’t allowed to carry on campus so that less than 30 people would be assuming room temperature.”
April 17th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Hoo boy. If there is one thing I learnt as a moderator on an American forum, it is that the issue of gun-ownership is like “religion”. Things can get pretty fanatical on both sides of the issue.
Here’s hoping that the discussion here will remain civil.
Cheers.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
@Makyz:
Shouldn’t the argument be “.. too bad it’s legal to carry guns so that the gunman was able to obtain one in the first place” ?
April 17th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
well, if you want to get techincal, I do agree with banning of guns, but also keep in mind people can kill people with basically anything from knives to your own hands. Sadly, it’ll never be resolved >_
April 17th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Don’t worry next election I’m voting for a democrat XP
April 17th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Eh, thing is, in other countries where gun ownership is common things like this rarely happen, and in some countires where gun ownership is banned these things still occasionally occur anyway. While I don’t think introducing some gun control is a bad idea as such, it seems clear that it’s not the real source of the problem.
April 17th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
CSmith: yes, people will still kill whether they have guns or not, but it sure is harder to kill 30+ people at one crack without guns. Unless, of course, you have a Death Note. ^_~
Whoa, it’s kinda ironic to see an “Antique Weapons Auctions” ad by Google here…
April 17th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
The guns the guy used were illegally purchased. The serial numbers had even been filed off. He couldn’t have legally obtained one in the first place, given that he was a foreign national.
April 17th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
It’s a shame none of the professors were carrying a gun.
April 17th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
If guns weren’t legally available in the first place, then illegal guns would be far fewer.
It’s a shame guns are allowed in the US in the first place, otherwise he would have just rampaged through the school with a butcher knife, and some football player probably would have tackled him before he got to his 5th victim.
April 17th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
It’s really a sad shame that this incident occurred, and since I’m nowhere near versed in how gun legislation works, I’m not going to touch that issue.
April 17th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
I read almost all 1000 comments on Digg the moment this story broke. While some were condolence messsages, the majority were pushing either antigun or pro-gun agendas.
The former can be summarised into, “Guns are a crime amplifier”.
The latter is, “We need guns to defend ourselves from other guns.”
Obviously the people who believe in the latter are 1000% percent American. They gained their country through an armed revolution, and believe that they need to be empowered enough to overthrow their government should it go astray. As if Bush isn’t astray enough. Also, they have never experienced a gun-free society and hence have the mistaken notion that guns are like air, and everywhere. They think that banning guns will make the honest citizen unable to defend themselves while the bad guys can still get guns easily. They insist that violent crimes rates in other countries are rising because they have banned guns. They think that the Va-tech shooting will have been stopped if the students all had been carrying a concealed pistol.
Unfortunately, there is a reason why America has the highest rate of gun crime and it is no doubt their sheer availability. Unfortunately, their culture is so steeped in violence that it is now not possible to remedy by only banning guns. Many an American, from the teens to the oldies, have the wrong mindset. The only similar culture that comes to mind are the Iraqi and Afghans…. says a lot doesn’t it.
If these Americans actually bother to find out more about the rest of the world, they’ll realise the folly of their ways.
I’m only talking about this issue because of the above article. I’m actually more interested in finding out more about the actual incident. I read the account of how the engineering Prof sacrificed his life to save his students and that was really sad.
April 17th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I agree much with DM on this, thus why am I commenting? Commenting online has pretty much became an affair where stands must be drawn with vitiriol spilling everywhere.
Back to this issue, sadly to say most of the immediate circumstances surrounding the Virginia Tech shooting will be lost in the waves of reaction. The state of events in this debate has been so charged that everything is used to support their stand despite people not knowing what’s being used.
The Second Amendment that allows everyone to have the right of protecting themselves is a noble act, and it was borne out of necessity at that time. During that period, danger was much apparent and readily identified thus it was possible for measures to be taken against them. The political nature of it that DM mentioned was recognised as well, however I see that the main onus behind it was really self-preservation during that period. However, we are facing with phantoms of danger, terrorism and rogue shooters like the Columbine teenagers. Are we that able to defend ourselves against such threats? Even with firearms? It would be trite to say that if we are to remove ready access of firearms, we would be in danger from those who already have it.
To quote Mahatma Gandhi, an eye for an eye leaves the world blind. Saying that we would need to arm ourselves with firearms against people who have guns to start with is a knee-jerk reaction. If we have to arm ourselves all the time against supposed rogue elements in the society, what’s the need of the police and the security agencies? In this point of time, protection need not be furnished by the individual, this protection can be accorded by the police and such. Naturally, the question of what this safeguard fails will arise. If there are less people with guns, the less the ordinary people are empowered in the event that they go rogue. The amount of power that guns wield is too great for everyone to hold it. Great power comes with great responsibility.
And if democracy requires everyone to live in fear and having restrictions to protect the very cornerstones of freedom. How’s different is that from being in a cage?
April 17th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
People are too selfish and refuse to see the bigger picture. If everyone carried a gun to protect himself, the entire society would turn into a much more dangerous place. Sure, at that particular incident, less people might have died if someone had stopped the killer with a gun. But ultimately such a way of thinking will cause more harm to society as a whole. Vigilante justice is a dangerous thing.
Humans are prone to errors and impulsive actions. Put enough guns into the hands of enough people, and eventually some of them will do stupid things.
You might think that you are just helping to keep you and your family safe, but in reality private ownership of guns makes society a lot more chaotic and unpredictable than necessary, making it harder for trained professional police officers to do their work.
We give up a lot of things in exchange for law and order. I don’t see why the right to bear arms cannot be one of them.
Freedom is an illusion when you live in uncertainty and fear.
April 17th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Well, i saw the headings on the first page of the Straits Times this morn. It’s a pretty piece of news to start the day. Some idiotic gunner just has to take his frustration out on his peers coz of his ‘circumstances’.
Bright young lives wasted just like that… :(