Vealmince

I doubt anything I say here hasn’t been said before, but I’m always completely mystified when people who otherwise seem at least vaguely competent at rational thought repeat the NRA slogan - now all together kids, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” - as if they actually believe it.

Because it is obvious to any sentient being with a capacity for reason greater than that of a retarded chihuahua that this is utter, utter nonsense. Here are four very simple reasons why:

1. It is easier to kill someone deliberately with a gun. Easier than stabbing them, poisoning them, pushing them in front of a bus or beating them to death with a computer keyboard. No planning required, instant gratification - bang, dead, before you have time to think about it or regret it.
2. It is easier to kill someone accidentally with a gun. In countries with lots of guns, there’s no shortage of manslaughter cases where people were shot through mistaken identity, fooling around, accidents, losing your cool in the heat of the moment, etc. It’s a lot easier than killing someone accidentally with a computer keyboard.
3. It is easier to kill yourself deliberately with a gun. Without guns, some would-be suicides would instead slit their writsts, poison themselves or jump off a tall building. Some wouldn’t. We lack sufficient knowledge of the afterlife to say for sure what proportion of people who shot themselves regretted it afterwards or might have been put off if they hadn’t had a gun handy, but we can only assume it was at least some of them.
4. It is easier to kill yourself accidentally with a gun. See #2, particularly fooling around and accidents. Guns are dangerous!

These all add up to one very big meta-reason against gun ownership: fewer guns means fewer dead people. Japan has probably the strictest gun ownership laws in the world, which goes a long way to explaining this statistical difference:

Admittedly, Japan has had a fairly quiet year gun-wise, but this is a pretty big disparity that is hard to explain away by other factors. So in order to justify private gun ownership, it would be necessary to demonstrate the social good of allowing people to own guns. These benefits must outweigh the deaths of 29,947 people each year, so they’d better be bloody good. But almost none of them stand up to basic scrutiny.

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Australian Martin Bryant still holds the record for the world’s worst gun rampage, when he killed 35 people at Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996. A dubious honour, to be sure. Prior to this, Australia had a fairly strong going-postal tradition: Milperra in 1984, Hoddle Street and Queen Street in 1987, Strathfield in 1991 and the Central Coast in 1992*. After Port Arthur, in a display of political bravery and farsightedness that proved to be as rare as it was uncharacteristic, the Howard Government passed tough gun laws and collected and destroyed more than half a million weapons.

Since 1996, here are some sobering statistics*:

The US has had Jonesboro in 1998, Columbine in 1999, Wichita in 2000, Red Lake in 2005, Goleta, Capitol Hill and the Pennsylvania Amish school in 2006, Trolley Square earlier this year and now Blacksburg*. Australia has had none*.

That’s just gun massacres folks. Guns, sorry PEOPLE with guns, kill at least 30,000 people in the US each year. In Australia, it’s more like 300, most of which are suicide. Yet opinion polls consistently show that Americans believe poor parenting and violent movies and video games are greater causes of gun violence than gun ownership.

More guns = more dead people. It ain’t rocket science.

But President Bush took time out from consoling his country to assert that he continues to believe in the “right to bear arms”. From memory, every time a gun massacre has occurred in the US (that’s six* so far during Dubya’s presidency) he has immediately come out to reassure the NRA nutjobs that even though a whole bunch of people were just killed by guns, sorry, people with guns, he won’t make stricter gun laws.

What would make a politician do something so abjectly undiplomatic, insensitive and idiotic as to stand up in front of a bunch of people whose loved ones were just killed with guns (people with guns) and say “We support people’s rights to own guns”?!

The only possible answer is that Dubya and all US politicians live in absolute fear for their political lives instilled by a power-mad lobby group that represents the views of its insane, stupid and myopically self-centred members all too well, to the obvious and ongoing detriment of American society.

*(Lists and statistics collected from Wikipedia. May not be complete, accurate or true.)