Some common sense on gun control

[Quantum Windbag]

Something everyone should read.

When you write about guns, as I do, and a shooting like the one in the Aurora movie theater happens an hour from your house, people call. I’ve already done an interview today with a Spanish newspaper and with Canadian radio. Americans and their guns: what a bunch of lunatics.
Among the many ways America differs from other countries when it comes to guns is that when a mass shooting happens in the United States, it’s a gun story. How an obviously sick man could buy a gun; how terrible it is that guns are abundant; how we must ban particular types of guns that are especially dangerous. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence responded to the news with a gun-control petition. Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times has weighed in with an online column saying that “Politicians are far too cowardly to address gun violence . . . which keeps us from taking practical measures to avoid senseless shootings.”
Compare that to the coverage and conversation after Anders Behring Breivik murdered sixty-nine people on the island of Utøya in Norway, a year ago next Sunday. Nobody focused on the gun. I had a hard time learning from the news reports what type of gun he used. Nobody asked, “How did he get a gun?” That seemed strange, because it’s much harder to get a gun in Europe than it is here. But everybody, even the American media, seemed to understand that the heart of the Utøya massacre story was a tragically deranged man, not the rifle he fired. Instead of wringing their hands over the gun Breivik used, Norwegians saw the tragedy as the opening to a conversation about the rise of right-wing extremism in their country.
Rosenthal is wrong, by the way, that politicians haven’t addressed gun violence. They have done so brilliantly, in a million different ways, which helps explain why the rate of violent crime is about half what it was twenty years ago. They simply haven’t used gun control to do it. Gun laws are far looser than they were twenty years ago, even while crime is plunging—a galling juxtaposition for those who place their faith in tougher gun laws. The drop in violence is one of our few unalloyed public-policy success stories, though perhaps not for those who bemoan an “epidemic of gun violence” that doesn’t exist anymore in order to make a political point.

The Price of Gun Control?By Dan Baum (Harper's Magazine)

 

[GuyPinestra]

Common sense gun control??

Use both hands...

 

[Big Black Dog]

Guns are not the problem. The problem is with the people that use them to commit a crime. Taking away guns will never solve the problem. A person can always find a way to obtain a gun. People convicted of a crime that involves the use of a gun should be jailed for a very long time - maybe as much as 20 years. If it becomes common knowledge that you will be jailed for 20 years if you use a gun in a crime, then at least you might think twice before you do it.

 

[Sinjorri]

ive yet to see a hand gun kill someone without assistance.

 

[asaratis]

Guns are not the problem. The problem is with the people that use them to commit a crime. Taking away guns will never solve the problem. A person can always find a way to obtain a gun. People convicted of a crime that involves the use of a gun should be jailed for a very long time - maybe as much as 20 years. If it becomes common knowledge that you will be jailed for 20 years if you use a gun in a crime, then at least you might think twice before you do it.

There are those who would argue with you about the deterrent value of long prison sentences. I suspect that people on the verge of committing a crime do not think at all about the penalty for being convicted of it. I'd also guess that few of them even entertain the thought of being caught until their criminal act is completed.

 

[M14 Shooter]

Do we consider limiting the religious rights of law-abiding Muslims because a negligible minority might fly an airliner into a skyscraper?

No?

Then why do we consider limiting the gun rights of law-abiding citizens because a negligible minority might shoot up a theater?