"Just Shut Up", He Explained

Time to stop talking about guns

To be a little fair, that's only the title of Eugene Robinson's column rant in this mornings print version of the Washington Post, not the title on the online version: Stop the gun madness. So it's a little hard to know whether that title was written by Robinson himself or by some nameless editor.  Nevertheless, I doubt that Robinson would deny the sentiment: "Just shut up, you right wing neanderthal kid killers, and let your betters make the decision to disarm you in our self interest (yours is of no interest to us)."  Some excerpts:

It is shameful that gun control only becomes worthy of public debate following an unspeakable massacre such as Newtown — and even more shameful that these mass killings occur so often. What usually happens is that we spend a few weeks pretending to have a “conversation” about guns, then the horror begins to fade and we turn to other issues. Everything goes back to normal.

Indeed, it turns out that gun ownership is more popular in the United States than gun-grabbing by government, it happens to be protected by the Constitution, much like free speech, and the mass tragedies, as bad as they may seem at the time, do fade into the background noise in a population of some 300 mullion people, living and dying all the time in all manner of ways, benign and horrible.

But Britain recognizes the obvious distinction between guns legitimately used for sport — shotguns, hunting rifles, some target pistols — and those meant only to kill human beings. Most handguns are banned. All automatic and semiautomatic firearms, including the kind of assault weapons used at Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and the other mass shootings in this country, are banned.

In Britain, individuals must have a “good reason” to obtain a license to own a firearm. Self-defense is generally not considered an adequate reason — nor should it be, since research suggests that guns actually make the owner more vulnerable.

We are not Britain.  We have a second amendment to protect the individual rights to keep and bear arms because of the British.  We still remember their oppression, and how the possession of the military arms of the times (and even more advanced high accuracy hunting rifles) helped us win our independence from the Brits.  The founders put that into the Constitution in the knowledge that no government serves the will of the people indefinitely without the ability of the people to defend themselves from the government.  They were not idealists.

As for the charge that owning a gun makes you more vulnerable, there is of course some basic truth in that; without guns there could be no gunshot wounds, friend or foe.  However, knives, guns, fists, explosives, clubs, and other miscellaneous weapons would still be used to kill.  Cain did not have a Bushmaster.

However, the link between guns and self defense is far more complicated than liberals would prefer you to believe.  While you can't count events that never happened very well (example, how often has a gun brandished in self defense stopped a murder is an inherently unanswerable question), studies suggest that guns were used to stop 2.5 million crimes in 1995 (recent numbers are probably lower because, in fact, crime rates have been reduced since 1995).  How many of those crimes would have been murder?  Criminals do fear guns in the hands of victims, for good reason.

Hence the unbelievable response by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre to the Newtown killings. The solution isn’t to take assault weapons out of the hands of madmen, LaPierre argued, it’s to put armed guards in the schools so there can be a great big gunfight when the homicidal madmen show up. Never mind that armed officers at Columbine tried, and failed, to stop that massacre. Just be paranoid. Fight guns with more guns.

Tell you what, if we are all expected to disarm and go without the possibility of self-protection, let's disarm the Secret Service, and make them protect the President with clubs, disarm the guards at Sidwell Friends school, where the President's and David Gregory's kids go to school, disarm the guards that I expect guard the front door at the Washington Post, and disarm the guards at every federal facility that I have ever visited; clearly they are making it more unsafe for their wards, if you believe Eugene.

This must be the year when America says: No more.

This must be the year when America stops thinking of simplistic solutions to complex problems (I'm also thinking of the budget here).  Taking the guns out of the hands of the vast majority of law abiding citizens isn't going to have any substantial impact on the rates of crime in the democratically controlled big cities, where, frankly, the majority of the problem exists.  If gun ownership correlated with gun crime, the rural areas would be hot beds of crime.