Tuesday, August 28, 2012

A Bit More On Gun Control (Last one! I swear it!)

Ok, so this is apparently my second gun-control post in a row, but it concerns a point I've been finding myself making repeatedly, so I wanted to put it down in written form.

As I mentioned before, one of the biggest impediments to meaningful gun control (or hell, even a meaningful conversation about gun control) is this ridiculous Dirty Harry fantasy in which gun nuts imagine that if only they had been in Columbine/Aurora/Tucson/Virginia Tech/wherever, they would have pulled out their trusty revolver and put the shooter down with one shot. Because of this, not only should we not have any form of gun control (not even, say, for this group of people who bought over $87,000 in weaponry and were planning on killing the president), but there should actually be more guns available.

What makes this argument so frustrating is that it's based completely on fantasy -- not only has this never happened (despite, you know, ample opportunity), but even a child could see the problem with this logic. You know what, gun toting vigilante fantasy guy? Maybe you're not quite as good a shot as you think you are. And maybe we shouldn't base our public policy off of your fantasies.

And while I'm making this argument with multiple people, along comes a situation proving exactly what I'm saying. Now that the dust has settled around last week's Empire State Building shooting, it turns out all bystanders shot were hit by police bullets.

So to recap, a team of trained professionals who are charged with handling such situations and have actually practiced what to do in such situations still end up causing multiple injuries and shooting multiple innocent people. Because it turns out that in very chaotic situations, even well-trained law enforcement have a hard time stopping a crazed gunman.

But I'm sure you, crazy gun nut who thinks they're some amazing shot, would do far, far better than trained law enforcement in such a situation. In fact, I'm so confident you'd be able to do it that I agree cyanide-tipped armor-piercing bullets need to be freely available for purchase. After all, I've got a nation full of gun experts ready to sprint into action should anything go wrong. And since they've successfully stopped so many mass shootings already, don't they deserve the benefit of the doubt?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

9 people with minor injuries is a little better than 12 dead and 58 injured, isn't it?