So we want to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. Then the only people who will have them will be the criminals, who WILL find a way to get them, regardless of gun control laws.
Makes sense to me.
NOT.
Gennimom, with respect, I don't understand this perspective. It makes me imagine criminals and regular folks dukcing dowm the street in a runnig fire-fight. How does arming regular citizens improve the situation?
I'm not snarking, I'm really asking.
Actually, it doesn't look to me as if Gennimom was arguing *for* wild-west shootouts, but rather pointing out a problem that gun-control advocates have never, to my mind, satisfactorily answered.... That is: Why do we think that the person willing to break our law against murder will be stopped short by, and obey, any laws against guns?
Logically, this has never followed for me. Throw a kazillion gun laws against Joe Criminal (background checks, waiting periods, no felony convictions, etc.). If he has no respect for laws against robbery, rape, murder, whatever, why do we think he will submit meekly to a law that says "no concealed weapons"? There is a wide black market for underground guns, as we all know. Someone intent on killing someone else is not going to cower before your background checks; he'll make a connection and snag an illegal piece.
So take away gun shops, tighten the loopholes about purchases at gun shows...what do you do about the black market? I know that the VT murderer got his gun legally. But yesterday he violated our most serious laws (and, I'm guessing, a no-weapons policy at VT)--do we really think that someone intent on that level of carnage would have been stopped by your gun ban?
Of course, you might come back to me and say that if guns simply didn't exist in the United States, there'd be no illegal guns and no black market. Ok: how does that happen? Ban new-weapons manufacturing? Then what do you do about guns already on the streets--ask criminals to turn them in, out of their sense of civic obligation? Good luck on both of those.
This is why people like me (a sane person in a humanities department who does not own a gun) agree with Gennimom. The only people who observe gun laws are the law-abiding. Those who *don't* care about any laws are then in a position of power over the rest of us. Assuming that law-abiding people who possess guns would immediately be prompted either to illegal violence or to bloody firefights is a pessimistic non-sequitur. Besides, even if my option *is* "criminals" and "regular folks" duking it out, when the latter is trying to stop the former in a situation like yesterday's, I would a million times rather have that than an empowered gunman intent on murder blazing away with impunity *until he decides to kill himself*. (How would having an armed person on the scene yesterday, intent on stopping the killing, necessarily have made the situation *worse*?) I cannot see how letting only the guy who says "f*** you" to law, society, and human feeling have the gun is the moral thing to do.
Most of us choose not to act immorally or in an anti-social way even in situations where we don't think the law can successfully punish us. I don't cheat on my husband, I don't smoke crack. There is a huge gap between having access to something and acting irresponsibly with it. Until gun-control advocates can successfully explain to me how they'll compel the lawless to observe these particular laws, I'll keep thinking that it's better for the law-abiding and responsible to have some power as well.
