Guns sell security
October 11, 2007
Atrios says:
Any time there’s a horrible school shooting there’s talk of changing security as if there’s something schools can or should be doing. It’s stupid. We live in a society where lots of people have very easy access to guns. People who aren’t too concerned about getting caught or killed, as is usually the case, will generally manage to injure or kill a few people. They could just as easily do this in a school bus, or outside the school, or at some gathering of people elsewhere, or whatever. Turning the school itself into an extreme security location where students inevitably just feel like criminals won’t really help stop anything. [ School Security ]
Of course, if you get rid of the guns (or restrict the sale of guns) then you hurt the gun manufacturers. But if you keep the guns and beef up security, then you get to continue to sell guns, increase the market for guns, and also increase the market for other security paraphernalia and security services.
Gun legislation might make our schools (and colleges, and streets) more safe, but it won’t build markets. And we can’t forget the importance of that.
Posted in Speaking Very Slowly
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October 12th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Even though I was robbed at gunpoint, which led my then boyfriend to start carrying a gun, over the last 12 years, I’ve increasingly begun to believe that the Brits have the right idea. You never hear about a kid going into a British school with a shotgun and shooting a bunch of his classmates and teachers before turning the gun on himself.
And last year (2006) when I was visiting in the Summer, the police were collecting knives and other pointy objects to further reduce violence. I must say that I felt much safer walking the streets over there than I usually do here, and I do know self-defense and now live in an area with a much lower crime rate.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
The thing that I can’t ever get my head around is: How on earth has it ever been legal for anyone to have a gun?
I see the reasons behind having guns for hunting and I realize that decades ago, in the frontier days, there were practical reasons… And of course, the Constitution. I’m a fan of that, but I certainly don’t consider all of these people to be a “well-regulated militia”. Things are much different now than they were then. The armed forces are no longer farmers bringing their rifles along, and more to the point, those founding fathers never would have imagined the sorts of weapons that people would use that amendment to support.
Nowadays… Handguns? Submachine guns? Assault rifles? What are those for? The main reasons that I seem to hear are that guns need to be legal so that you can protect yourself from people with guns (which seems to be a rather circular argument) or guns need to be legal so that the people can protect themselves from the government or enemy invasion (which sounds like a reasonable idea but I believe would prove to be quite irrelevent if the issue ever actually came up).
Regardless of what people say, those guns exist to kill people, and even if you have them “just for show” or “for protection”, that is what they are for. As long as it is legal for tens of millions of people to own and equip these sorts of weapons, people will use them much more often then if they didn’t have them.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:02 am
J. Lynne, they always say if guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns. Personally, I think that makes them easier to identify.
Ashley, I’m not sure I’d go so far. The assault weapons ban should have been maintained, but I don’t have a problem with handguns, rifles, and shotguns. There are people who do sport shooting. And hunting is not only culturally important in Virginia but very necessary. And I think there are still places in this country where you need a gun for self-defense from wild animals.
But the ownership and operation of guns ought to be at least as well-regulated as ownership and operation of a car.
October 13th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Yeah, the hunting thing is tricky for me, as I don’t support the idea of recreational hunting, but then… I’ve never known anyone who was a hunter (or even regularly fished)… Vermont will be a big switch. The only people that I’ve been around who I’ve known to have guns were my dad who briefly had a handgun (which he claimed to regret selling, as it could have helped put him out of his misery), and the drug dealer that my sister dated for a while.
Sport shooting and such, well… It is entertaining yourself with a loaded lethal weapon that was designed to kill people, so that still seems a bit questionable to me. But again, I’m coming from the viewpoint of someone who has never really engaged in any kind of sport or martial activity, so I don’t have any actual experience to relate.
October 13th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Hunters play a vital role in our ecology here; most of the large predators of deer and other game animals are gone, pretty much leaving us. The overpopulation leads to habitat destruction for other animals and, in Northern Virginia, danger to traffic. So as long as people hunt responsibly and within the law, hunters are a great help (recreational or not). All of the hunters I know either eat what they kill or give portions away to other people who eat what they kill, something I respect very much and wish there was more of — the more we can limit reliance on commercial slaughterhouses, the better.
As far as sport shooting (target and hunting) is concerned, I think that’s one of those things you’re perfectly within your rights to disapprove of, but I can’t see any state-interest reason to limit. Shooting at paper targets is not a problem; shooting at clay pigeons is not a problem, shooting at people is.
No one does sport with automatic weapons, though, and they ought to be either banned or very, very closely regulated.
October 13th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Also in defense of hunting, some people truly rely on it to feed their families. Some of my relatives in Minnesota would literally have no food to eat if they didn’t hunt. So that’s fine. I also have relatives who hunt with bows and arrows–fancy, high-tech ones, doncha know.
Since I loved “Duck Hunt” as a kid, but I don’t actually have any intention of shooting either people or animals, I don’t have a problem with target shooting.
I agree with Thud, though. The automatic weapons are entirely unnecessary.
October 13th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
*sigh* O.K. I have to admit, having lived in Alabama and now Maine, despite being a pescetatrian (vegetarian plus fish), I do reluctantly approve of game hunting because it’s true that every game hunters that I’ve every met has made no waste of their kills and here in Maine, in the Winter months, hunting is a way of feeding many rural families. I do have a problem with some of the trapping methods allowed here in Maine, but that’s a different argument.
Since the VA Tech shootings, there has been a lot of talk up here about tightening the gun regulations so that even private sales have waiting periods and checks and such, which I highly approve of. I hope it comes to a vote.
I have to agree that a lot of guns that are being sold don’t have any purpose other than killing people like machine guns, etc.. I don’t think those should be legal for sale. No one’s going to eat a deer with a hundred bullets in it.