In the last week, there are been two op-eds that could be construed as being pro-gun.
Did someone slip a fake copy onto my driveway??
In today’s op-eds, Walk Softly and carry a Big Gun, a commentary by an Alaska resident who asks:
I am puzzled now by the strange way people here are dealing with mountain lions … which is to say, letting them kill you.
And last week, Diana Wagman went shooting:
Guns are bad. All my life, it’s been that simple. At my son’s preschool, if a child pointed a banana and said “bang,” he was admonished to “use the banana in a happier way.”…
So what would make someone like me change my mind? I met this gun enthusiast. As research for my new novel, I asked him many questions, all the while voicing my disgust. My character might use a gun, but I never would. “Come to the range,” the gun guy said. “I’ll teach you to shoot.”
Hmmm… Go figure.
UPDATE: Suman Palit is adopting the same approach.
quite possibly the funniest and most disturbing sentences of the year in those two articles.
Use the banana in a happier way? I could do so much with that one. But I’ll refrain. ‘Cuz I’m classy like that.
Contempt prior to investigation is the path to everlasting ignorance. (Spencer?)
If every gun enthusiast followed this example, the effect would be amazing. I have taken many non-shooters out to “smash a few clays,” and have repeatedly witnessed the outcome described in Diana Wagman’s article.
I was pleased to see that one of those gun fearing/hating people was named yesterday to the 2004 Ladies All American Skeet Team. She beats me pretty regularly.
Sometimes minds can be changed one at a time.
Perhaps the Crime Lobby did not make its payment on time.
I never could understand the phobia about firearms. They are just tools and/or toys. Being fearful of a ‘gun’ makes no more sense then being fearful of a weed wacker or a toaster oven. I like to molest my liberal friends by asking them for the name of 1 person killed by a gun. Then when they give me a name ( it is most often Kennedy, but that is my age group. I suspect if I was 10 years younger it would be Lennon), I point out that the person in question was killed by a bullet, not a gun. And when they say, well the bullet came from a gun, I respond “And the gun was fired by a human. Why not blame the human or the bullet? The actual dirty deed was done by the bullet, while the event was initiated by the human. The poor gun is just caught in the middle. Like an old Sarg once told me. “Private, there are no dangerous weapons, but there are plenty of dangerous people”.
Thing is, just as few gun advocates think their right to own guns is a right to kill anyone who bothers them, few gun opponents think that guns are the only thing to blame for crimes, and that segment is looked on with the same derision as losers like Lee Harvey Oswald are by gun advocates.
What the issue really boils down to, for most rational players in the issue, is the question: Do guns make killing people too easy? Considering the fact that there is documented evidence of four-year-old children killing people with guns, it is fairly evident that it is far easier to kill people with guns than with more primitive weapons, like bows and knives.
Note that I’m not talking about things being ABLE to kill people; yes, a trained Marine can kill a person as fast with a knife as he can with a gun. But the Marine has to undergo years of training and conditioning to be able to fight effectively enough with a knife that he can quickly kill a person who is taking even the most rudimentary self-protection measures (running away), while someone with almost no experience at all can kill anyone (even the aforementioned trained Marine!) using a gun.
Guns don’t kill people, but they do make killing people much easier, so easy that even kids can kill almost anyone with them after a week or two of practice. How the ready availability of such easy-to-use lethal weapons will affect society is the real source of the dispute. Gun advocates believe that “an armed society is a polite society,” or that people are less likely to act up when everyone has lethal weapons close at hand. Gun opponents understand that no society is ever perfectly polite, and that when people are armed, disputes will turn deadly far more often, maybe even often enough that a single insult could spark a chain reaction of shootings that make the Rodney King riots look like a Girl Scout picnic in comparison.
Is the strength of an armed society worth its brittleness? Gun advocates say yes, gun opponents say no, and it all really depends on where each person feels the line where the tradeoffs are too expensive needs to be drawn.
Tatterdemalian: There are documented cases (and probably far more than 4 year old gun murders) of four year olds killing themselves by drinking bleach. Do we ban bleach? Or keep it out of reach of children? As for a single insult turning society into a shooting gallery, that sounds a tad alarmist to me. You have a point that guns make killing people easier, but relatively speaking, not that many people want to kill people. That’s why murders make the news. And murder rates have been on the decline for quite a while now. Arguably, an armed populace has contributed to that statistic. I had a girlfriend once who was knee-jerk anti-gun. She thought I was a savage because I keep a handgun in my house for self-defense. In the course of an argument once, she told me through tears of frustration that when one of her friends went off to college her friend’s father “gave her a cell phone to call the police, not a gun.” To which I responded, “Oh yeah. That’ll work. ‘Excuse me Mr. Rapist, could you please wait a minute while I call 911 and then wait until the police get here. Thank you so much.'” Needless to say, she was not amused. She did not, however, have an effective counterargument.
>Of course, he said, if I didn’t want to wait, I could drive 10 minutes and buy an Uzi illegally out of someone’s car.< Why does that sentence sound so out of character for a man who just "explained the California laws, some of the most stringent in the country"? Sumpin' don't smell right.
First off, Fred, your initial comparison is completely different from the point I made. If you could show that there have been documented cases of four-year-olds killing adults by forcing them to drink bleach, then it would be legitimate. As it is, bleach is quite evidently not as dangerous as a gun, just like a gun is nowhere near as dangerous as a nuclear bomb.
Second, I’m not anti-gun. I would own a gun myself, probably several, if I had the money to buy them. However, the anti-gun crowd does have some valid concerns, once you realize that they are mostly rational human beings and not stereotypical effete snobs who wet their pants at the mere thought that someone within a five mile radius might own one of those terrifyingly loud boom sticks.
Tatterdemalion:
While I don’t doubt that there are some rational people on both sides of the argument, very few people who oppose guns are willing to grant that there may be rational people who support the right to own them.
Someday, a political movement may spring up that supports both the explicit and irrevocable right of a citizen to be armed, and rational limitations on that right that aren’t of the ‘camel’s nose’ variety. Someday, those who dmeonize guns and their owners may put firearm deaths into the context of wider public health issues and recognize that swimming pools and cars are a far greater risk to small children.
Someday, Uma Thurman may call me for a date. too…
A.L.
FWIW, gun “rights” are an issue on which the Internet has succeeded in changing my mind. Not being a Constitutional scholar, I’ll let the meaning of the 2nd Amendment be argued by those who are. But I was very surprised by the depth of evidence that gun crime (and that’s what’s the problem, right?) looks like it could be reduced by stricter enforcement of laws that shoule be much less controversial (no sales to felons, no strawman purchases). I was very surprised to read what a lame job we do with these laws, and how a relatively small number of gun dealers are responsible for a large proportion of guns used in crime.
I’m certainly willing to grant gun rights advocates that we should enforce obvious laws before coming up with new ones.
I have to agree with A.L. and Andrew. I didn’t mean to imply that anyone is an “anti-gun nut”, nor am I a “gun nut.” I have, however, had dealings with both, and both are pretty scary.
I agree with A.L. that someday, we might see a rational politcal movement that treats guns no differently that any other product of an industrial society. That day may only arrive in the pages of sci-fi. I am not optimistic.
Having said that, I’ve found most so-called ‘anti-gun’ people are not really anti-gun. They are mostly parroting opinions widely held (and heard) by the media. When allowed to interact with guns, and rational gun owners, there is almost always a transformation of the rigid stance into something more nuanced. Everyone’s mileage on this varies, of course.