Gun Control: A Conversation with a Friend (3)

This series of posts is a conversation about gun control between me and an American friend living in Canada. Today's comes from my friend Jeremy. The first and second posts are here.

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Hi Cory,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply and the link to that article. The issue of gun control (or the nearly complete lack thereof) is one that riles me up a bit. While understanding the significantly differing cultural views towards violence helps to make sense of why there have been no real changes in gun laws (and why there won't be for the foreseeable future) except to actually make guns more prevalent in public, I think that the "more guns as deterrent" idea simply goes against reason. The US is already, by a good margin, the most heavily armed country in the world (the runner-up is that other beacon of democracy and freedom: Yemen). Adding more guns to a gun-saturated culture in order to reduce gun violence sounds to me like the alcoholic who wakes up with a hang-over and decides to have a stiff one to feel better rather than to consider consuming less alcohol. To me, the overarching problem is accessibility. I think I read that something like 40% of gun purchases are at shows where background checks are famously not required, allowing anyone, convicted felons included, to purchase weapons that are as removed from the muskets the founding fathers had access to as iPads are to feather pen and ink.

There's also the issues of stand your ground laws (which seem to me to simply allow an aggressor to claim victimhood and then rub out the only potential witness to a murder) and the fact that so many easily obtained US guns are being used in the Mexican drug wars (a link I will try to dig up is about US weapons being melted down, turned into musical instruments, and toured with, performed on by Mexican musicians). Ahh, easy guns and border security wrapped up in one, but this is a rabbit hole that gets deep and twisty so I'll stop.

None of this has anything to do with hunting and home defense, which I think are perfectly legitimate functions for guns. But the way the floodgates have opened up in places like Florida, Georgia, Texas are disturbing.  I think the Charlton Heston quote provides a window in to why gun control is so necessary but also unobtainable: when he talks about the exhilarating sense of freedom that comes from gun ownership, I think he really means the intoxication that comes with the realization of possession of power, wrapped up in wood and blue steel. And two things I think are 100% certain in life are man's basic sinfulness, and how power corrupts people. Open-carry + stand-your-ground + average-sleep-deprived-American = I'm not sure, but I don't think it's good.

Jeremy