I generally avoid the gun debate because it tends to get so heated and irrational – and I have no particularly strong feelings on the matter. However, a recent shooting summed it up rather nicely I thought.
The gunman in Sunday’s church shooting in Texas has been identified as 43-year-old Keith Thomas Kinnunen.
It remains unclear what his motive was, but he opened fire at the West Freeway Church in Fort Worth on Sunday. He was first named by NBC Dallas Fort Worth.
Kinnunen had a criminal past which involved arrests for theft and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
He killed two people – a security guard and a grandfather who had just handed out communion – before being brought down by former FBI agent Jack Wilson, 70.
The usual anti-guns argument is that nutters with guns cause mayhem, so the government should stop people having guns and this will cure the matter. This tends to be reinforced by the lack of shootings in this country since Dunblane.
Well, yes, and the USA does seem to have its fair share of shootings without our level of gun control. Counterbalancing this is that other countries have similar levels of gun ownership but do not have the same level of nutters going on shooting sprees, so there is something else going on.
However, the antidote is seen here in that a decent person with a gun was able to stop the shooter long before any police arrived – who, when seconds count are only minutes away.
Gun control is a hotly debated issue and having no particular desire to own one (preferring the more primitive bow and arrow, myself) I’ve tended to keep out of it. That said, I have no problem with people owning guns. Gun control tends to mean that ordinary people don’t have them, whereas criminals do – and I am inclined to include the government in that description.
The ability for ordinary people to shoot back is a strong argument against gun control, I feel. Likewise an armed militia that can take down an out of control government. But I’m just fantasising there…
The fear of an out of control government reverting to tyranny was the original reason for the right to bear arms being a thing in the US.
Except for all the shootings in this country.
We’re up to about 10,000 firearms offences per year, including 1600 injuries or fatalities.
Criminals have little problem getting guns.
I did pick up on this point about criminals having guns. The issue that hits the headlines and therefore winds up the gun control lobby is the mass shootings at schools and churches. We haven’t had that happen now for a long time, so the gun control lobby can point to this and claim that it has worked and they do have a point – even if it does mean that innocent gun owners were affected along the way. Switzerland, on the other hand has plenty of gun owners and doesn’t have these mass shootings. It does seem to be a cultural thing.
As the saying goes – “it’s their culcher, innit?”
“This tends to be reinforced by the lack of shootings in this country since Dunblane”
I assume you mean school shootings, rather than criminals popping each other? People very often quote Dunblane to point out (correctly) that there have been no school shootings since. What they always forget or omit, is that there were none before either. The handgun ban made no difference what so ever
That is precisely what I meant. Although not just school shootings. Hungerford was a mass shooting of innocents which led to restrictions on automatic weapons. There was another one around the time of Dunblane IIRC – where one shooter went on a rampage killing his wife and then going down the street shooting at passers by.
We’ve never had that many, which is why the restrictions always seem draconian in comparison. The States do seem to have an underlying problem with nutters going off on one in either schools or churches, but compared to overall gun ownership, it is a very small minority.
Ok, this was the one I was thinking of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings
“The States do seem to have an underlying problem with nutters going off on one in either schools or churches, but compared to overall gun ownership, it is a very small minority.”
The US has always had lots of guns legally available, indeed historically they were more freely available than they are now, yet there weren’t people committing mass shootings back in the day. That’s a phenomenon that’s grown slowly over the last 30-ish years, to its current epidemic status.
My theory is that if you plotted the increased use of SSRIs vs mass shootings you’d see a direct correlation, especially in the teenage school shooter demographic. SSRIs are well known to create murderous and suicidal fixations in a very small % of users, particularly the young, so the fact that millions of US children are routinely dosed with these things, AND have access to weaponry means that its pretty much guaranteed to create mass shooters.
The Bill of RIGHTS………….1689 gives the right to bear arms. Subsequent laws defy this right and should therefore be illegal. That is my opinion. Note that just over 100 years ago you just had to fill out a couple of forms to then buy a gun.
Looking at the 20th Century alone, if you count the number of people murdered by their own Governments (Nazis about 20 million,USSR a minimum of 80 million, China another minimum of 80 million, North Korea, Cambodia etc. and so forth) and compare that total to the number killed by the worst civilian mass murderers, anyone who says that guns should be removed from the hands of the public and only the Government should have them is evil and/or delusional.
The issue of mass shootings in the USA is complex and the availability of guns is in INVERSE proportion to the areas of the highest death rates. Try reading just the headlines in this blog:
https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/?blogger=https://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/
And as Jim points out, dosing children with drugs for ADHD and tranquillisers with known problems and side effects causing paranoia,depression and hallucinations is another factor studiously ignored by everyone.
But the simple answer is ban guns and let the government which allows crime to run rampant and licenses these drugs to have sole possession of guns.
Chairman Mao said “Power comes out of the barrel of a rifle”. The problem with gun control isn’t about guns, it is about control.
Politicians like simple answers. They also like control.