Guns Are Good For An America On The Brink Of Full-On Evil Banality.
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Unless good citizens are allowed to have at least 40 guns on hand, how will criminals get all the guns they need from the glut of guns sloshed out on the street that real men create by clamoring for more and more guns?! Hold it…!
What I mean is…
Americans should be allowed to have as many guns as they believe will satisfy their fearful, monster-under-the-bed needs, because criminal gun runners would run out of guns if all the manufacturers weren’t oversupplying us… That still doesn’t sound right. Ummm…
Give me one more chance…
The right to own many guns is protected by the Constitution, which also allows people to restrict my ability to buy guns on a fear stoked whim, or have guns stolen from my bunker. Geez uh! Again!
What am I saying wrong!!? Shit!
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Ever notice when an argument for guns is used it is usually meant to scare you for not having a gun, or coerce you to agree that they need a gun to save you? This is a good tactic because fear often works. In Great Britain, they have many fewer guns on a per capita average than us; in contrast the U.S. has 160 times the number of gun deaths, also on a per capita average. Yes, knife attacks are more common there, but comparatively, even fewer people die. More importantly, no one is easily trained to kill fifty people with a knife. Now if hand grenade attacks went way way way way way way way up, then you may have a decent fear comparison.
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You have heard the trope that criminals will have guns no matter what, by hook or crook, so there must be good people with guns. It is a very common meme on Facebook, often with a scary criminal pointing a gun at the camera. Yet this scenario is true whether we sell over a million guns in an average year, or if we had or sold one-hundredth the guns. The problem is that the overall math changes as the quantity of guns increase, an even greater proportion of deaths will occur. When fewer guns are sold overall, or in our possession, that means fewer people will have guns, or be able to get them, both criminals and good citizens.
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If we manufactured five guns a year, who would have them? Five criminals or five good citizens, or split as 3–2 or 4–1? At worst, five criminals would be active who could not kill as many as if 250,000 guns were produced each year, or were available to be stolen from your bunker, and all the excess can be off loaded to criminals.
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Another way to look at the issue of the proportion of guns in society, and proliferation: How many times have you known friends or family to not have guns at home, and not in their possession? Haven’t 99.999% not needed anything like a gun to save them? So do all those people who have never needed a gun need to have a gun anyway? I am not saying having a gun never helps save lives, but if having more guns made it much more likely something terrible could happen to the gun owner with their own gun, why would any family want a gun for some day in the distant future they may happen to need one?
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Nearly 40,000 Americans are killed each year with a gun. About 25,000 are suicides. That means nearly 14,000 are shot by someone else in a criminal fashion, with about 1,000 from accidental shootings. If not having a gun, meant this dropped to 10,000 violent deaths a year including any increases via other methods, what sane person would want every other person wielding a gun, or their neighbor or gun shop overflowing with guns that can be stolen?
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You can garner from the thought experiment two paragraphs above that fewer deaths from guns would occur if fewer guns were sold. Gun freedom proponent studies purport that over two million people are saved each year, but that is untrue for two reasons. First, better studies say less than a tenth of a percent of crimes, not necessarily life and death crimes, involve the mostly fairytale gun “savior”. The other reason is more guns to protect more guns is a circular firing-squad theory. Imagine how many people would need to carry a gun, at all times, to make any dent on crime with guns. Maybe one person in every family.
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Let’s say that was true. Well, how many more successful suicides would there be? I say successful because drug overdoses have been less than 5% effective, and guns are 96% effective in achieving self-inflicted death. Men are going to use a gun, they are more likely to have access to one, and it may give men the feeling they are not taking the easy way out. Or real men have guns, so dying with a gun is hyper-manly masculine. You can imagine other ways of suicide but each one requires a lot more thought, and work. Buy a gun and never use it, or use it. Many places let you buy a gun at a moment’s notice, or nearly. Yes, buying a gun doesn’t need to mean you are suicidal, but you can think you are not really suicidal, yet you are trending that way. This may happen if depression is only starting to take hold.
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Tying a noose, fastening it to something, climbing on a chair, then…, is more complicated than using a gun. Standing on the railing of a high bridge, standing on a track as a train approaches, or ledge of a tall building, each method gives your death plan away. You need to come out of your house, and be all public about it. Not that people don’t do such, I had a family member and a friend finalize their life, each one using a method noted. I have also had thoughts decades ago that put me in such a place; but waiting until the next day, things were better, and I moved on. With a gun, nobody ever needs to know you very, very, nearly did it many times, until you do. Guns are private, simple, and an immediate method. You can be in your shop, and before allowing yourself a real chance, your life is done, and gone.
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Even if suicides reduced by half, and they could with sober and logical gun policies, we would have 12,000 fewer suicides a year. The odds are at least one of my two friends would still be alive if guns were half as easy to get back then. Definitely many would still be alive without the current proliferation of these human life snuffers. Other nations prove this. Yet our 2nd Amendment supposedly makes more death a good thing, even worthwhile. That is some fucked up, gunslinger stupid, macho, constitutional originalist bullshit. The machinations and contortions done to the arguments of rabid gun enthusiasts, to convince us that America is safer and-or better because we have too many guns to defend us from too many guns, are ridiculous.
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We sell so many guns, and they are so easy to buy that the traditional underground market for guns is not the problem. Sixty percent of gun crimes in Chicago come from guns purchased in Indiana and Wisconsin. Those Hoosiers have such a glut of guns, they are stacked up so high along the border of northwestern Indiana, they just fall over into Chicago. It is an open trunk gun bazaar, not a clandestine criminal rendezvous. Due to about 393 million guns already in circulation, and the fact that they are so cheap for guns-in-the-trunk dealers to buy, causes the U.S. to have more gun deaths due to criminal activity than every European nation, and scores of others.
There are 7.86 guns per our 50 million gun owners. But most people own just one or two guns. That means it is the over buyers who create the glut; therefore creating a higher likelihood for criminals to get guns. Again, if you have manufacturers making more guns, there will be more in circulation. Gun gluttons are causing our epidemic of gun suicide deaths and end up arming a good portion of criminals in the U.S.
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I surmise that two out of five suicides, directly and tangentially, are likely due to the rabid gluttony gun buyers, who each have about 40 guns. Direct causes would be family, or friends using the guns; tangential causes can be the glut of guns, and easy access laws. Greater availability provides the potential for more gun usage; fewer people can kill with guns when there are fewer to access. Another subset are the mass hysteria gun buyers. Rushing to buy more guns is a sickness; the run on guns hysteria symptoms include soiled undies, and urine soaked shoes.
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Bad gun policies kill lots more people than bad and good people would otherwise, that is why we must have good laws, developed by stable individuals. Many, especially white men, are easily overstimulated when guns are mixed in with their testosterone influenced ideology, so best not to listen to the spitting mad, maskless Michigan protesters, or the foaming at the mouth Facebook meme-meister, as to gun policy.
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Note that I am talking ease of access, and the overall quantity of guns sloshing around, not preventing Americans from having guns. Yes, there will still be murders and crimes with other weapons, but the glut of guns is-the-what that kills too much. That said, deaths will never be as high with knives, Ninja stars, poison arrows, nunchucks, catapults, pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, Shirley Temples, or f’ing sporks!
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Last word goes to gun rights’ zealots: Again, remember the 2nd Amendment!* Oh, the humanity…! You can’t mess with perfection, archaic parchment, the don’t tread on me bogeyman, or the monster under our beds! God save us from infidels who have updated, logical, and scientifically smarter policy ideas!
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*But do not remember the Alamo, where all the gunslingers died.
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