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Gun control won't stop school massacres ...
By Steve Salerno
November 7, 2007
The killing of six young party-goers in Wisconsin comes barely six months after the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, and is sure to set in motion the familiar cycle: impassioned calls for gun control, met by the usual bumper-sticker rhetoric from those who insist that guns aren't the problem.
Who, by now, doesn't know the gun-lobby talking points? ''If owning a gun becomes criminal, only criminals will have guns.'' True, though hardly a momentous revelation. That circular logic applies to any prohibited behavior: ''If cocaine possession is criminal, then only criminals will possess cocaine.'' Similarly: ''Guns don't kill people, people kill people.'' Yes, and the same could be said of atomic weapons. Should we all own one?
Ever since Columbine, gun apologists have scrambled to blame these periodic American tragedies on ''the culture of violence,'' ''the media,'' or anything that muddies the waters. The problem for the NRA and like-minded interests is that when you strip away the verbiage and the smokescreens, the lone constant in all of these tragic episodes was the gun itself. There have always been schoolyard disputes, and one is hard pressed to document that the desire to kill one's classmates is more prevalent today than it once was. (Indeed, the overall rate of violent crime -- which could be said to reflect society's ambient level of aggression -- is as low as it's been in 30 years, says the Bureau of Justice Statistics.) Rather, it's the availability of guns that makes today's skirmishes more lethal, when they do occur. In the schools of my youth, arguments sometimes ended in fist fights; kids walked home with bloody noses. But they walked home.
What's interesting, though, is that many of those who bemoan the transparency of the gun lobby's alibis are guilty of buying into a supposed remedy -- gun control -- whose premises are just as flawed as anything put forward by gun propagandists. Even assuming the success of the difficult endeavor to separate known criminals from guns (and what about people who use a gun to commit their first crime?), gun control rests on two core notions: that we must (a) remove human error from the equation, and (b) render guns as safe as possible to use.
The problem with (a) is the gun-control movement's ostensible conception of human error as something rare and easily addressed. In reality, of course, human error is an eternal, everyday constant. Think about the dozens of relatively benign missteps committed by even the most responsible among us: We misplace our keys. We throw the car in reverse a fractional second before glancing in the rear-view mirror. We forget to put the milk away after dinner. And then there are the deeper ''errors'' that hint at mankind's darker side: temper tantrums, machismo, silly misunderstandings, hormonal fluctuations. The intrinsic fallibility of human nature cannot simply be wished away in any risk-benefit assessment of guns. If we're going to tolerate such weapons, we must also accept that humans are going to get careless, drunk or angry when guns are nearby. The results will be what they've always been.
Secondly, if the gun-control movement misperceives the nature of people, it also misperceives the nature of guns. Consider the stunningly oxymoronic notion of ''gun safety,'' wherein we talk as if we can somehow leach guns of their inherent risk. It astonishes me that the same people who uphold the citizen's right to self-defense tout gun safety as a solution to the hundreds of accidental or impulse shootings each year.
The fundamental Catch-22 should be obvious: Of what use is a gun for spontaneous self-defense if it must be stored unloaded in a locked cabinet with its safety on and a trigger-guard in place? Rendering a gun ''safe'' to have around the house neutralizes its use for defense. You can't have it both ways: To be useful, a gun must be dangerous.
The doctrine of nuclear disarmament represents mankind's (grudging) admission that we can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. But where guns are concerned, the political gales seemingly have eroded our resolve to abide by what our instincts tell us: that no halfway ''controls'' will succeed at mitigating gun violence. As long as there are guns in general circulation there will be Columbines and Virginia Techs and Amish school shootings, and more massacres like the one that took place in Wisconsin.
As reasonable people, we already know the only approach that would be effective in preventing such horrors. The question is whether we have the will to undertake it.
Steve Salerno lives in Macungie. His latest book is ''SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.''
http://www.mcall.com/news/opinion/anotherview/all-left_col-a.6126491nov07,0,6572158.story
Gun control won't stop school massacres ...
By Steve Salerno
November 7, 2007
The killing of six young party-goers in Wisconsin comes barely six months after the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, and is sure to set in motion the familiar cycle: impassioned calls for gun control, met by the usual bumper-sticker rhetoric from those who insist that guns aren't the problem.
Who, by now, doesn't know the gun-lobby talking points? ''If owning a gun becomes criminal, only criminals will have guns.'' True, though hardly a momentous revelation. That circular logic applies to any prohibited behavior: ''If cocaine possession is criminal, then only criminals will possess cocaine.'' Similarly: ''Guns don't kill people, people kill people.'' Yes, and the same could be said of atomic weapons. Should we all own one?
Ever since Columbine, gun apologists have scrambled to blame these periodic American tragedies on ''the culture of violence,'' ''the media,'' or anything that muddies the waters. The problem for the NRA and like-minded interests is that when you strip away the verbiage and the smokescreens, the lone constant in all of these tragic episodes was the gun itself. There have always been schoolyard disputes, and one is hard pressed to document that the desire to kill one's classmates is more prevalent today than it once was. (Indeed, the overall rate of violent crime -- which could be said to reflect society's ambient level of aggression -- is as low as it's been in 30 years, says the Bureau of Justice Statistics.) Rather, it's the availability of guns that makes today's skirmishes more lethal, when they do occur. In the schools of my youth, arguments sometimes ended in fist fights; kids walked home with bloody noses. But they walked home.
What's interesting, though, is that many of those who bemoan the transparency of the gun lobby's alibis are guilty of buying into a supposed remedy -- gun control -- whose premises are just as flawed as anything put forward by gun propagandists. Even assuming the success of the difficult endeavor to separate known criminals from guns (and what about people who use a gun to commit their first crime?), gun control rests on two core notions: that we must (a) remove human error from the equation, and (b) render guns as safe as possible to use.
The problem with (a) is the gun-control movement's ostensible conception of human error as something rare and easily addressed. In reality, of course, human error is an eternal, everyday constant. Think about the dozens of relatively benign missteps committed by even the most responsible among us: We misplace our keys. We throw the car in reverse a fractional second before glancing in the rear-view mirror. We forget to put the milk away after dinner. And then there are the deeper ''errors'' that hint at mankind's darker side: temper tantrums, machismo, silly misunderstandings, hormonal fluctuations. The intrinsic fallibility of human nature cannot simply be wished away in any risk-benefit assessment of guns. If we're going to tolerate such weapons, we must also accept that humans are going to get careless, drunk or angry when guns are nearby. The results will be what they've always been.
Secondly, if the gun-control movement misperceives the nature of people, it also misperceives the nature of guns. Consider the stunningly oxymoronic notion of ''gun safety,'' wherein we talk as if we can somehow leach guns of their inherent risk. It astonishes me that the same people who uphold the citizen's right to self-defense tout gun safety as a solution to the hundreds of accidental or impulse shootings each year.
The fundamental Catch-22 should be obvious: Of what use is a gun for spontaneous self-defense if it must be stored unloaded in a locked cabinet with its safety on and a trigger-guard in place? Rendering a gun ''safe'' to have around the house neutralizes its use for defense. You can't have it both ways: To be useful, a gun must be dangerous.
The doctrine of nuclear disarmament represents mankind's (grudging) admission that we can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. But where guns are concerned, the political gales seemingly have eroded our resolve to abide by what our instincts tell us: that no halfway ''controls'' will succeed at mitigating gun violence. As long as there are guns in general circulation there will be Columbines and Virginia Techs and Amish school shootings, and more massacres like the one that took place in Wisconsin.
As reasonable people, we already know the only approach that would be effective in preventing such horrors. The question is whether we have the will to undertake it.
Steve Salerno lives in Macungie. His latest book is ''SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.''
http://www.mcall.com/news/opinion/anotherview/all-left_col-a.6126491nov07,0,6572158.story
