The problem with gun violence is people, not guns

Another shooting, this time in Sutherland Springs, Texas on Sunday at a church service.  Someone who should not have been able to buy a gun somehow slipped right passed the eagle eye of the NICS system run by those super sleuths of the FBI, and bought a gun from a gun store. He violated laws against murder, against felon in possession of a gun, and lying on 4473 form.  So the existing laws clearly did not stop him from murdering 26 people, and injuring 20 others.  And guess what?  The proposed laws won't stop the next guy either.  Why?  We'll get to that below.  First I want you to go to the American Thinker, and check out the article by Daniel John Sobieski entitled When Jeanne Assam's Gun Stopped a Church Massacre.

Sobieski's point is that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. It is a hard fact, one that can only be ignored, but who's truth can not be denied. Only when confronted by someone else with a gun do these people finally stop, either shot by the good guy with a gun, or by suicide, or rarely by surrendering.  Guns are not inherently evil in and of themselves.  I have yet to see one jump up of its own volition and begin shooting up the place.  They also have no power to turn an otherwise good guy into a bad guy.  A gun does not, like some movie scene suddenly start calling out to the person in possession of it "Come use me to shoot a bunch of people in a church."  There is no evil spirit in the gun.  Guns are also not magic talismans, instantly shooting down people without aiming as in movies.  No, a gun must be trained with and the skills one develops are perishable.

Interestingly, gun violence has gone down as the number of guns has grown.  It is as if John Lott was right all along.  Today you are less likely to be killed by gun fire that at any time since the 1960s.  By the way, you are approximately twice as likely to be killed in a traffic accident as with a gun.  But what has increased is the number of mass shootings.  Glenn Beck speculated yesterday that the increasing number of mass shootings may have to do with  way the media seems to lionize these people.  In any case I have made a policy  of not including the name of the shooter in any of my recent posts.

One of the interesting things about mass killings is that most have occurred in legally defined gun free zones.  Schools, shopping malls with no gun signs, theaters with no gun signs, churches, government offices and so on.  To me this speaks of the killers deliberately planning to kill as many people as possible without having anyone else armed with equivalent force.  In other words, evil intent.  Which leads me to the idea that it is not the guns that are the problem to be solved, but rather the people wielding them.

The solution for guns in general, and mass shootings in particular lies with a recognition  that the world is a morally ambiguous place, at best.  People with evil intent are everywhere, and even those with the best of intentions often do evil anyway.  The idea that the police can be everywhere and stop every bad thing from happening is an illusion.  Police can not be everywhere all the time.  And even if they could, the police are not angels, but composed of the very same people that inhabit the rest of the world.  Whether you attribute the evil that stalks the world to the devil or to man's perversion, the fact remains that it is the people themselves that must be dealt with, not the instrumentality.  How does it help to leave even more victims defenseless in even more locations?  What is needed is more responsible people with guns in more places to be able to quickly respond with a gunman decides to do evil things.