I have always wanted to write a definitive post on the gun problem. Today, I began it, and I hope to finish it today. Here is the first draft!
The Problem
We have a gun-happy society, and unfortunately, too many shooters that take the lives of many people and wound many more.
So, the problem statement is rather simple: What to do to stop the killing and wounding?
We have a abundance of laws on the books in every State, County and City that should help the situation, but the fact is the laws do not work. This is quite evident as the news will attest today, tomorrow and on into the future.
Many believe that by physically removing all guns, or removing some types of guns from public hands, the situation will dramatically improve. I differ strongly on quite a number of counts:
1) Removing guns from the public will make the public much more vulnerable to criminal elements;
2) The criminal is not deterred by laws, is most likely not to be found to confiscate his weapons, and is most certainly able to purchase guns on the black market, or even from friends and acquaintances. So, the threat has not been deterred at all. In fact, the public would be far more threatened than before;
3) The mentally-deficient persons that load up and go on a shooting spree might be deterred from finding a gun, since there wouldn't be any nearby. This is the principal excuse some have to confiscate our weapons. The case of mental deficiency represents the primary challenge to all of us that abhor the current situation.
4) It appears that the school system, parents, police and the medical profession collectively do not have a definitive solution to the mentally-challenged individual that grabs a gun and goes killing.
5) The educators do not want to be sued if they do something about their observation of a deficient student. The parents are reluctant to act on their offspring, and the police must act within their policies, which excludes many deterrent acts. The medical profession is quite reluctant to pass judgment on a person openly without extreme proof of their danger to the public, and they too, want to avoid lawsuits.
6) It is a well-known fact that over two million encounters of citizens with a criminal occur every year where the armed citizen managed to resolve the situation satisfactorily. Often, simply showing a weapon is sufficient to ward off criminals.
7) All of us are aware that calling 911 for the police is necessary in such an encounter, but one must not forget that the police are from 5 to 20 minutes away, which gives the criminal sufficient time to wreck havoc in many quite unpleasant ways from basic robbery to rape and murder. That is what the defensive weapons are owned for: to thwart the criminal before the police arrive.
8) Even partial solutions such as banning the AR-15-style of automatic weapons, and high-capacity magazines is whistling in the dark. Many of the shootings have been done with pistols, but few have been done with rifles. This is a ready-fire-aim solution. (Incidentally, I agree with banning fully-automatic weapons, pistol, carbine or rifle, from the public.)
What is very obvious indeed is that it isn't the gun that kills, it is the deficient person with a gun that kills. A gun is an inanimate object. So, the focus ought to be on prevention of such deficient people from acquiring a weapon at all, ever! It is also obvious that if criminals can use the backdoor to get a weapon, so can the deficient! He can find a way to steal it, too, or find it in the home, where parents are remiss in locking their weapons up very securely.
This appears to me to be the dilemma we are in, and sitting here in my home today I do not have a solid answer to the deficient person problem: how they are identified early enough; or what can be done to ensure they do not go on a killing spree with any sort of weapon, such as a gun or even a knife, machete, baseball bat or chainsaw, for instance.
What I am sure of is that I have the weapons at hand to defend myself, and so do millions of our citizens! And I am convinced that taking weapons away from the citizenry is not only contrary to the Constitution, it exposes all of us to the criminal element in a serious way, and those elements are quite aware of the eventual possibilities presented to them from unarmed homes.
If I have left out any significant elements here, I would appreciate being told!
I have always wanted to write a definitive post on... (
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