Annie Get Rid of Yer Guns
Gail-Tzipporah says she is "not in favor of gun control because I know that all the law-abiding citizens will be the ones holed up in their own homes while the all loose cannons will be out there shooting anything they can find."
But that's already the case, isn't it? I'm not aware of any mass-shootings that have been averted on account of a little old lady from Chatsworth whipping out her handgun and plugging a villain before he unleashes fury.
America is looser with gun controls and tighter with incarceration than other industrialized nations. We are unrivaled in turning ordinary citizens into criminals, and those folks are the ones most likely to get a gun, once they've been returned to a society that ruined their name. That does not help you or me or the little old lady in Chatsworth.
Rob, how can you be aware of something that was "averted" and therefore never happened? The city of Kennesaw, GA, to which I frequent for work, passed a law sometime back that required homeowners to also own guns. What was the impact, you might ask? Well, the crime rate immediately dropped. That shouldn't come as any surprise. After all, if you're a cat burglar, are you more likely to hit a home that may be occupied by a gun owner, but probably not, or a home that, by law, must be occupied by a gun owner?
In any event, what exactly do you mean that America is "turning ordinary citizens into criminals" and that "society ruined their name?"
Exactly. No way to prove what has NOT happened. And the Kennesaw anecdote is only one of several along those lines that can be examined in light of this issue.
Laws don't necessarily change market conditions. Take drugs, for instance. We might have the most stringent anti-drug laws of any nation, yet on a per-capita basis, Americans consume more drugs than anyone in the world. There's a demand for drugs, and so long as the demand sustains itself, there will be plenty of suppliers to meet that demand, despite the fact that drugs are illegal. Same with prostitution - it's illegal everywhere but Nevada, but people need sex and intimacy, so the profession thrives nonetheless. Prohibition was a joke.
But let's go back to drugs. One of the reasons the war on drugs has been so expensive and so futile is that most of the dollars have been allocated to choking off the supply routes rather than trying to decrease the demand. Revoking the second amendment won't do anything to decrease the demand for guns; instead, it will create a huge black market of gun runners.
The only way to choke a pure free-enterprise operation like the distribution illicit drugs is to remove the profitability. The only way to do that is to provide all addicts with their drugs free, which will cost much less than the per-capita amount now spent on suppression and incarceration. These addicts would also, once registered, be available for counseling and treatment. The net effect would be to reduce the new addiction rate as providers and dealers would not have repeat customers to sustain the the distribution system.
As long as someone can make money selling drugs, there will always be someone willing to take the place of those we expensively warehouse in our already crowded prisons. As far as stemming the flow from the bottom up, you might as well try to stop sex from happening for all the good it will do you.
I also am not in favor of gun control and the thing about not raising the question of the government telling people what to do is no different than the attempt by this administration to work around the Second Amendment and deny the citizens the right of that amendment.
A case in point is my own experience. Today I emailed my councilman and council person Wendy Greuel along with the City Attorney and the Mayor asking if the firearms that are being turned into the Gun Buy Back Program are checked for reports of being stolen and then returned to the rightful owners.
According to the Daily News the LAPD is saying that ALL guns turned in WILL be destroyed. If that is the case then our local government is STEALING FROM THE VITIMS what is rightful theirs to get back. Maybe it is time that those of us who have made the report of stolen firearms and have been denied our property get together and file a class action law suit to recover the monetary value of that which was stolen from us.