Today at Sultan Knish Daniel Greenfield has an article entitled What We Don't Talk About When Talk About Gun Control. It's a long article, but if I were to put it into a nutshell: the people pushing "gun control" are laser focused on the instramentality of gun violence, to the exclusion of the social and moral factors involved. This aspect of the gun control movement is different from every other aspect of the Left, with the possible exception of environmentalism.
Take alcoholism. There’s the object, alcohol. There’s the choice that the individual makes to drink the alcohol. And, finally, there’s the social problems that can be blamed for widespread alcoholism.
The gun control movement operates in the same object-oriented space of the prohibitionist movement. For prohibitionists, the problem was gin. For the gun control movement, it’s all about the guns. Get rid of the gin and the guns, and the underlying problem goes away without having to do anything else.
While the old prohibitionism of sin substances, liquor, drugs, and pornography has been ridiculed and its legal infrastructure dismantled, the obsessive certainty that guns are inherently corrupting holds sway. The lefty media insists that the only solution to gun violence is prohibitionism and more prohibitionism.
Yet the argument for blaming guns is much weaker than the one for blaming drugs or alcohol. Alcohol and drugs are addictive compounds that shape how we think. Guns, unlike alcohol and drugs, aren’t addictive. Nor do they influence behavior. Their relationship to us remains an external one.
Greenfield goes on to note that by focusing on the gun, the Left excludes the question of why people kill others. Guns do not motivate people to kill, and people are infinitely imaginative when it comes to the means of killing, even mass killing. He points out that people have used cars and trucks to kill large numbers of people, as well as bombs. The question of what instrumentality is used is not what is interesting, nor should it occupy our government. If they want to do their jobs, they will instead look at the social and moral factors that cause people kill each other, and fix those things.
The media play a role here too. I don't know why it is that people who supposedly believe in the First Amendment can not see the value in the Second Amendment, but it certainly colors their reporting on gun issues
Most gun violence is still gang violence. Mental illness isn’t killing 5 or 6 people in Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore over the weekend. The media overlooks regular mass shootings in major cities, while zooming in on unusual mass shootings in suburban communities. That’s because the gun control movement really doesn’t want to talk about the social component of gun violence and organized crime.
Usually, the Left loves root causes. It can trace any individual dysfunction to the problems at the heart of a society. But when it comes to guns, it refuses to look past the physical object, while blaming everyone responsible for the existence of guns, from firearms manufacturers to the NRA. But blaming everyone involved with the existence of an object is not an examination of the root causes of its misuse.
The prohibitionists weren’t dealing with the root cause of alcoholism by busting up gin mills. The latest attacks on firearms manufacturers have just as little to do with the problems they claim to care about.
The fact is that a substantial number of people own at least one firearm. I would peg firearm owners in America at perhaps 100 or so million. These firearm owners own approximately 393 million guns. So, when one lone guy mass kills people at one location somewhere in the United States, remember that 392,999,999 people did not commit any crime at all. And neither did their guns. These facts put the lie to the gun prohibitionist movement. The Founders had it right when the wrote the Second Amendment into Bill of Rights protected by the Constitution.
The question is not what means do killers use to commit their crimes, but rather what moral and social factors make killing seem reasonable to those committing crime? Legislatures and law enforcement officials should look into these complex questions. But of course, the easier fix is always to prohibit ownership. Unfortunately that doesn't solve the real problem; indeed it makes it worse. Meanwhile such laws are of the type known as malum prohibitum do not inspire respect for the law. And in this case, they feel a lot like punishment for exercising a right.
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