Since nearly half this blog's readership AKA two of the five people who know I even exist aren't American and don't understand the complexities of the US gun debate; and because over half this blog's readership AKA two people I'm related to and one I met at rehab are American and don't understand the complexities of the US gun debate; I put together this short primer to help you understand why anyone who has an opinion on guns is full of shit.
The US Constitution
The crucial first step in understanding why everyone in America has been shot at least seven times is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to arms, specifically:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.Nearly every political argument in the US begins with blah blah blah and ends with the Constitution, which fair enough, it's the supreme law of the land; but the manner in which people use the Constitution to punctuate their arguments borders on the religious since most people who own guns also believe the Constitution was divinely inspired. Too bad this ignores the fact their favorite constitutional rule is called the Second Amendment, i.e., if G-d had a hand in the drafting process it probably wouldn't have been amended 27 times. Otherwise, it's perfectly acceptable to use the Constitution as game, set, match for every argument ever since all cases heard by the Supreme Court are decided on a 9-0 basis.
The Cultural Importance of Guns
The second step to understanding why all American 1st graders can count to 187 is because of the role guns have played in US history. Individual ownership was integral to our genesis, and guns are woven into nearly every aspect of the American narrative. Prohibiting gun ownership is a non-starter and is never going to happen, which of course means neither side will Saint Fu about it. Neither will I since I'm going to talk about it later.
The Opposing Viewpoints
One side of the gun debate wants to outlaw all guns forever. The other thinks the government is going to take their guns on Monday and throw them in concentration camps on Tuesday. There is no middle ground.
Both sides of this debate are populated by cretin inbreds, though one side is a bit more cousin-on-cousin action while the other is full on Ma, Pa, Granny, Uncle Leroy, Big Sis, and Little Joey had themselves an orgy. It will soon be apparent which is which.
Gun Control Advocates
The solution to every problem ever is to make guns illegal because black markets are just places you go if you want to buy hair weave, press-on nails, rims for your tires, jheri curl mix, old Martin Lawrence VHS stand-up, or second-hand Cross Colors shirts. You definitely can't get a gun that way since we've obviously won the War on Drugs and meth isn't an actual thing. Police should carry around small rocks since, lucky for them, a slingshot will fit nicely in that holster where a glock used to be.
Gun Enthusiasts
The pure fffffffffing crazy. This entry is going to be like 400 paragraphs long because I don't even know where to start. Errrr, how about the non-starter I mentioned above, where any mention of gun control, let alone sensible regulation, sends them into an apocalyptic fit of consumer madness since they're all conditioned to sprint off to the 7-11 to buy 15 Berettas each before the government shuts the whole party down even though, cough, cough, the aforementioned Second Amendment guarantees their right to buy those guns forever. You'd think an entire class of people so obsessed with governmental conspiracies to quarantine their guns cum rights would be infinitely more attuned to NRA conspiracies to coax them into even more consumer activity, but guess not.
The Opening Salvo
The gun debate is an infinite series of loops reanimated every time some sexually-aggrieved, early-20s honkey upset that being white isn't cool anymore takes his emasculation out on a bunch of people just trying to watch a movie, buy a shirt, or learn algebra. There's a short armistice in the immediate aftermath while everyone processes the same exact plot as last time but soon enough the gun control posse is advancing their utopian vision of flowers and teddy bears while Team My Trigger Finger Has Callouses expresses titular remorse for the victims but genuine remorse that people would seek to politicize such senseless tragedy since, durrrrrr, their insistence every feral cat be strapping is politically neutral, or something.
Cliches
Soon enough both sides drop the pretense of giving a shit about any of the victims and start recycling the same one-liners they deployed the last time they engaged in this same unproductive debate. People who own AK-47s will say "guns don't kill people, people kill people" while all the Volvo owners will answer with "guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people." All this sloganeering works since no one ever changes their mind because both sides just see these tragedies as validation of their own views.
Amateur Reasoning
There are only so many bumper stickers one can process during rush hour before the debate must graduate to logical zingers that generally only account for a single step in the thought process. This is is generally the domain of the pro-gun crowd and is where we get such Socratic insight as: drunk drivers kill more people than guns, ergo we should outlaw cars, hurr hurr hurr. Solid point aside from the three head scratches it takes for a 10-year-old fluent in un-English who read that statement in English to point out [1] a car's primary purpose is transportation, its secondary to flaunt wealth, and its tertiary to live in once your home goes into foreclosure, whereas the sole utility of a gun is to tear that azzzz up; and [2] the act of driving while impaired is already illegal, so not quite the parallel you made it out to be, izit?
This is another example:
Point taken, but escalate the conversation to the rights of sovereign nations to use weapons as deterrence - specifically Iran pursuing nuclear technology - and the logic behind this photo becomes a bit more conditional since support of regulations is an out-group phenomenon and clearly not something that should be imposed upon us.
Statistics
Statistics would be helpful here but there aren't any. I suppose you can read through the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports and cross-reference them against gun policies in various states to establish some sort of correlative relationship between gun ownership and violent crime, but then the NRA will just tell you you're wrong and now we're back at square one again. One of the major reasons there's no definitive research on the issue is because Congress has blocked the CDC and other government entities from researching firearm injuries because, you know, the government is coming to take our guns away.
Solutions
There's probably only one cause of gun violence, which only has to do with the existence of guns since this is not a complex issue. Plus, there's only so much finger pointing before people's arms become tired and we have to start thinking of ways to prevent mass-shooting tragedies rather than the every day violence affecting individual victims instead. This is generally where gun control advocates suggest reasonable gun control measures such as a ban on assault rifles even though they don't know what actually constitutes an assault rifle, while the gun whores suggest arming the entire law-abiding populace because the Wild West was most definitely a place where people never resolved trifling disputes at high noon. This if the whole world were packing fantasy is my particular favorite since it would have obviously saved lives in Aurora, where had three or four law abiders pulled their heat they would have shot just the assailant and not 20 others in the crossfire, nor each other since they would have all had time to calmly assess the situation and would have magically known they were all just good guys trying to save the day. All three or four of our heroes would have no doubt look and sounded like this dude:
Arming teachers is another solution recently put forward, which I think makes sense because 20 students killed in a one off is far more tragic than the ones who will be killed one at a time screwing around with teacher's gun. But gun safety, so perhaps I'm being irrational here.
A Bit More Context
To really, truly, legitimately understand the issue of guns in the USA, you have to know who exactly is making which argument. The gun control advocates are easy to understand - and consequently dismiss - since they're all just naive simpletons who think Affirmative Action has a positive effect on the lives of women and other minorities, but gun enthusiasts are far more complex, mostly because I can't comprehend how so much cognitive dissonance can exist in one person's head without it exploding. I mean, the top three stated reasons for gun ownership - self protection, target shooting, and hunting - all make reasonable sense, but I'm pretty sure reason #4 would be protection from government tyranny, which is where the crazy starts. To wit:
The government's going to take my guns! Which makes perfect sense since the government has actually expanded rights recently, not restricted them. The Second Amendment was ho-humming along for a good 200 years under the assumption the right to bear arms wasn't necessarily an individual right before the Supreme Court clarified in 2008 it was. Even President Obama of the Fourth Reich who wants to melt down your guns in order to refashion them as rakes and shovels for the work camps he has planned has said you can walk around Yellowstone or an Amtrak car with your gatling gun, which is more than you could do when George Bush was President.
The government's going to still take my guns! Because the people who'd presumably go door to door collecting your hardware serve in the military and most likely pray to the Second Amendment themselves. Spent their whole lives talking about government tyranny even though they fight on behalf of that very same government and would no doubt overloook the fact an order to requisition the public's firearms would be just the tyranny they've been warning everyone else every time they've claimed "ain't no one going to take my guns from me!"
My guns have prevented government tyranny! Can't really dispute this claim since there's no way to quantify it, though I can imagine the vociferous disagreement were I to point out the ACLU has probably done more to prevent tyranny than a couple Winchesters have.
The UN is coming! If our own tyrannical government isn't going to enslave us the the UN obviously will since our country isn't a permanent member of the Security Council and can veto everything under the sun, not to mention where's the UN going to get money or guns if the US doesn't give it to them?
Yeah boiiiii, look's like the tyrannical government DID come for my guns! You were right and I was wrong, but you lost a shootout with a drone missile while I'm working my way up the communist apparatchik.
I don't care if the tyrannical US military has tanks and planes and shit: Vietnam, bitches! I suppose the same resistance tactics could work were the US sending poorly trained soldiers halfway around the world to fight in terrain they had zero idea of how to navigate, but selah, Rudy was an inspiring movie. So was Dead Poets Society.
Survivalists. There's this odd subculture of doomsday preppers who spend their waking hours preparing for various Armageddon scenarios. Guns are at the center of this since, I don't know, you'll have to hunt rats somehow once the economy crashes even though the ability to grow food or build large things will still exist, just not the cooperation to do so. Bottled water and canned food are also at the center of this scene since anarchy won't mean people suddenly aren't hungry anymore. I only mention these people because surviving the initial cataclysmic event is one thing, but what happens afterwards? Guns, I suppose.
My Own Expert Opinion
People don't kill people, guns kill people. So do knives and socially-detached douchebags with access to high-capacity weaponry. The whole furor over gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings seemed pointless to me since going on a semi-annual rampage is a completely different phenomenon than the systematic gun violence that affects the US on a daily basis, which is where things like background checks, waiting periods, registration, and whatever else would have their effect. People would still get shot but not as much. But as far as limiting mass-shootings, not so much. There are plenty of ways to inflict mass harm, and if a gun's not available then Timothy McVeigh's autobiography is, which means guns probably aren't the real issue here, things like social equality and a sense of purpose are. Until those issues get addressed we're just going to have to deal with more and more shootings as well as the same interminable debates about nothing, really.
