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Lordandmaster -> RE: Gun Control And Tragedy (4/19/2007 6:13:49 AM)
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Have you ever lived in a country where there is reasonable gun control? Try buying a firearm in Britain or Denmark, and you'll see that it is indeed much more difficult to acquire one. You can't walk into Dixie Wahoo's Strip Mall Gun Shop and pick up a Glock.
I think it's pretty simple:
Insane college student + Glock = 33 dead, lucky it wasn't more
Insane college student + knife = 1 dead maybe if he has been taught how to use a knife.
Oh, and another thing you said: There are already too many guns in the street, so it makes no sense to regulate their distribution further--what kind of an argument is that? That's like saying there is too much shit in the toilet, so it makes no sense to flush it. Other countries (again, like Britain) had serious handgun problems in the past. I agree that few countries on earth--probably not any, come to think of it--have let their handgun problems get as bad as we have, but I fail to see how that is an argument never to try to clean up the mess we've made.
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ORIGINAL: Pulpsmack
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Lordandmaster
The flaw in this kind of reasoning is the assumption that "the bad guys" will have equal access to firearms whether they're legal or not. It's just not true. The murderer in this case bought one of his weapons at a local gun store. Just walked right in, Hi, I'd like to buy this one. If you remove strip-mall gun outlets from society, lone psychotics are going to have a MUCH more difficult time finding firearms to kill people with. Terrorists, mobsters--sure, they'll still find ways to buy guns if they need them. But insane South Korean college students won't.
I would counter with the flaw in reasoning is that less freedom to acquire means “much more difficult” or even impossible to acquire. Any nation that is a serious military power has enough weapons and security issues that ensure such instrumentalities will be readily available to the criminal population. Just this year we have had an MP5 submachine gun, a Glock .40 pistol, and two AR-15s (2 separate occasions) stolen from police cars in TX. There are too many guns here in the civilian population alone to EVER make regulation in the criminal world a reality. Remove those and it is too easy given the weaponry available to the military and law enforcement. Remove that and our borders are too soft to repel imported firearms from China, Russia, Mexico, etc. Remove that and a good old machine shop and some simple know how can churn out submachine guns from scratch.
The thing that people cannot wrap their heads around is that arms control is a lost cause. It’s an impossibility. Not an unlikelihood… an impossibility. We can bury our heads in the sand and make hopeful gestures like pissing in the wind, or we can accept the reality of the situation and do our best to protect ourselves. The only effective way of countering the violence (short of sociological breakthroughs) would be to have a police state, which runs counter to everything this nation stood for.
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