Again with the guns. Haven’t I learned anything?
Two things occurred to me today, reading all the standard boilerplate talking points (“SBTP”) of Responsible Law-Abiding Gun Owners™ (hereinafter, “RLAGOs” or “heroes”) in various places online.
One is about the SBTP that any and all instruments that might be used to kill are equivalent to guns. Bad People with Bad Thoughts will find a way to do Bad Things no matter what instruments they have available to them, so trying to control one type of instrument and people’s access thereto is futile and pointless.
Which, of course, is hogwash. No one can claim with a straight face that there is nothing you can do with a gun that you can’t do without a gun. You can’t drive a car into an elementary school and survive the crash, let alone drive up the stairs and from classroom to classroom running kids over. You can’t kill 20 people at once with a meat cleaver; maybe one, but not without getting up close and personal and risking a very messy reversal. You can’t walk into a restaurant with a concealed lawnmower under your coat. And a “bomb” is a lot harder to get, make, carry, place, deploy and use, let alone with any precision, efficiency or reliability, than the movies and 24 would have us believe (there’s a reason why the ratio of shootings to bombings is not and has never been anywhere close to 1).
Compared to any other instrument of any kind, guns make killing easier, more efficient, effortless, precise, clean, convenient, and most importantly, significantly less risky if not entirely risk-free for the killer. They make dangerous people more dangerous (by giving them more power, and more options), and more likely to act (by making the act [seem] easier, safer and more likely to succeed), by orders of magnitude over anything else. That’s why guns exist. It’s a feature, not a bug. A person who has a gun is more dangerous, more likely to attempt, and more likely to successfully carry out, whatever murderous or destructive act he might be inclined to envision himself committing, because of the aforementioned nature of guns, than one who has only a set of steak knives, a #2 pencil, a weed-whacker and a 1988 Pontiac Bonneville in his arsenal.
The second is an outgrowth of that. If it’s true that the instrument doesn’t matter, if it’s true that a man with a gun is no more dangerous or deadly in the same scenario than the same man with a crescent wrench, if there’s really nothing you can do with a gun that you can’t do without a gun, then there’s no reason for RLAGOs to worry about gun control. They can arm up for the Revolution at Home Depot, fight Government Tyranny™ with a circular saw, and keep a garden trowel under the pillow for home defense. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander; if the villains don’t need guns, then the heroes don’t need guns.
We’ll never stop hearing the SBTP that gun control only affects RLAGOs, and wouldn’t in any way affect “criminals” who “don’t obey the law” and will therefore “get them anyway.” But again, what’s good for the villain is good for the hero. If the “criminals” can get the guns they want despite the law, then the heroes can get the guns they want despite the law. (The only difference, of course, is that the heroes might have to stop congratulating themselves for being “responsible” and “law-abiding”; one wonders which they care about more.) So, again, gun control won’t affect the heroes any more or less than the villains.
I don’t want to belabor the point; we’ve all heard these SBTPs and refuted them in our own ways. Guns are the weapon of choice for villains and heroes alike, for very good reasons, and for precisely the same reasons. It’s dishonest to pretend otherwise. Heroes want guns for the same reason villains want guns, and vice-versa: more power, less risk.
Of course, whether and how gun control legislation and/or enforcement is or can be effective at preventing gun violence is a separate question, one that I’m not going to get into here. (Also a separate question: Whether the standard of effectiveness for laws is, "absolutely 100% guarantee that the prohibited conduct will never occur." Also a separate question: Whether and why this should be the standard of effectiveness for gun control, but nothing else. Also a separate question: Apart from gun control, what laws and legal regimes should be repealed and abandoned for failing to meet this standard.)
I will say this, though. To bring up one more RLAGO SBTP, we should supposedly be “talking about,” “focusing on” and “addressing” things like mental illness, moral depravity, decadence, criminal intent, “evil,” and whatever other human thoughts, ideas, tendencies, mental states, &c. are the “real” causes of gun violence, not the mere instruments thereof. As I’ve written many times before, guns are consumer products; commodities, manufactured and sold for [considerable] profit on the open market. Human thoughts, ideas, tendencies and mental states can’t really be controlled, certainly not by legislation or law enforcement; consumer products, and the markets in which they’re made, bought, and sold, can.
Human thoughts, ideas, tendencies and mental states are not concrete, tangible, profitable commercial products; guns are. They don’t have economic value; guns do. A cynic would argue at this point, that this admonition to focus on trying to curb violent thoughts and intentions instead of the [highly profitable] commercial products that enable them to be carried out, is a way of deflecting the conversation from the one thing that can be controlled to things that can’t, and not coincidentally, whose amelioration would not cut into anyone’s profits or make anyone feel less heroic.
I’d better stop before this cynicism gets the better of me. I don’t think I’ve written anything new here; isn’t it remarkable how the conversation never changes. I can’t remember the last time I heard or read an original idea about guns or gun control, from either side. I noted years ago that there’s nothing more depressing than talking about gun control with one of the self-appointed Heroes of the Next American Revolution™, and today has been a very depressing day. Not as depressing as our apparent helplessness, powerlessness, and ineptitude in even attempting to prevent the next tragedy that [insert proposed gun control measure here] “would not have prevented.”