“Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.” – Unknown
“Drunk driving. Do we go to the Ford Motor Company and tell them, stop making these automobiles because people get drunk and kill people in cars?” – Jesse Ventura discussing gun control
I love how alcohol and driving seem like they are comparable arguments in the gun control debate. Alcohol is not designed with the intent to cause drunk people to drive into other humans and slay them. That is simply an unintended consequence of the social utility of alcohol use coming into irresponsible conflict with the physical utility of a car.
Meanwhile guns are in fact designed with lethal capacity or intent as their primary utility as a deterrent to statistically negligible potential for crime against ones person on the domestic side. The intended consequence of a gun is to kill or injure severely. The unintended consequence of guns is that most of the people that use them to kill or injure others aren’t the ones we intended to do the killing or the intended targets.
This is all about access. There is no argument here. Every country that controls guns has statistically less gun violence. PERIOD. If you want to argue about anything then your only true argument is that you don’t care or care enough about restricting gun access if it gets in the way of your personally held belief in owning guns. Gun owners are secretly willing, or simply totally unconscious of this and the social costs of gun ownership and therefore are unwilling to pay the personal costs of restricting gun ownership.
No statistics, no reason, no rational argument will convince a gun advocate that maybe just maybe throttling back access and the quantities of guns is good. Their decisions are not based on facts. They are based on the emotion and belief in the supremacy of their right to own that weapon. Every death, every school shooting, every child that caps his little brother will come with a litany of secondary or tertiary reasons why it happened but never will the fundamental ease of access or the absurd abundance of weapons be suspect.