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The Second Amendment, the NRA and The Gun Banners
By: Dan McLaughlin
December 26th, 2012
The school shooting atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut has, predictably, touched off another round of the perennial gun-control debate. Especially for parents of young children (my youngest is the same age as most of the victims), the horror of the shootings is almost beyond description, and tends to make rational discussion impossible. And also unseemly, as Jonah Goldberg has explained. More to the point, this is one of those issues where the public demands foolproof solutions that remain elusive: we keep saying never again after mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and all sorts of other manmade and supposedly preventable disasters, but theres never a perfect answer that guarantees that any such thing will never happen again (this is, for example, why anti-terrorism policies are best focused on terrorist organizations rather than lone nuts). We can only and always base public policy proposals on what will reasonably improve the situation without imposing costs we cant live with.
The reality of no perfect or costless solutions lends both a hysterical quality to the gun debate as well as a one-sided burden of proof. Gun control advocates suggest a goal (the complete non-existence of firearms) that is not politically, legally or practically possible, and argue that opponents of any gun control measure show how their alternative would be 100% effective by comparison to a gun control utopia that doesnt and never will exist. In a more rational, realistic debate, you would compare the actual proposed gun controls to a world without those proposals and in that rational world, the first question for gun control advocates after Newtown is why gun control in Connecticut didnt work after the Brady Campaign hailed the states tough gun laws as a model of public safety. Gun control complete with an assault weapons ban, waiting periods, background checks, gun free school zone laws and the rest was already tried in Connecticut, and it failed to make a difference. If Newtown means anything in the gun debate, its that gun control doesnt work.
Read more at:
Gun Control, Gun Rights, Gun Politics and Newtown: Part I of II | RedState
By: Dan McLaughlin
December 26th, 2012
The school shooting atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut has, predictably, touched off another round of the perennial gun-control debate. Especially for parents of young children (my youngest is the same age as most of the victims), the horror of the shootings is almost beyond description, and tends to make rational discussion impossible. And also unseemly, as Jonah Goldberg has explained. More to the point, this is one of those issues where the public demands foolproof solutions that remain elusive: we keep saying never again after mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and all sorts of other manmade and supposedly preventable disasters, but theres never a perfect answer that guarantees that any such thing will never happen again (this is, for example, why anti-terrorism policies are best focused on terrorist organizations rather than lone nuts). We can only and always base public policy proposals on what will reasonably improve the situation without imposing costs we cant live with.
The reality of no perfect or costless solutions lends both a hysterical quality to the gun debate as well as a one-sided burden of proof. Gun control advocates suggest a goal (the complete non-existence of firearms) that is not politically, legally or practically possible, and argue that opponents of any gun control measure show how their alternative would be 100% effective by comparison to a gun control utopia that doesnt and never will exist. In a more rational, realistic debate, you would compare the actual proposed gun controls to a world without those proposals and in that rational world, the first question for gun control advocates after Newtown is why gun control in Connecticut didnt work after the Brady Campaign hailed the states tough gun laws as a model of public safety. Gun control complete with an assault weapons ban, waiting periods, background checks, gun free school zone laws and the rest was already tried in Connecticut, and it failed to make a difference. If Newtown means anything in the gun debate, its that gun control doesnt work.
Read more at:
Gun Control, Gun Rights, Gun Politics and Newtown: Part I of II | RedState
