Gun control discussed

Well, I certainly hope it is annoying gun lovers of Australia that Slate is running an article noting how John Howard's gun buyback actually did put a sudden end to mass shootings of the kind all so frequent in the US.

While no one realistically suggests such a buy back is politically possible in the US, and the general tone is of pessimism as to what can really be achieved in a country already brimming with private weaponry, Slate does have an interesting article arguing that history tells us the certain forms of violence have been successfully tackled in the US.  I wasn't aware of the incidents mentioned in this aspect of US history:

 One example is class violence, once seen a shameful but ineradicable feature of American life. Beginning in the 1870s, the United States became infamous around the world for the brutality of its labor clashes, in which gun battles, dynamitings, and hand-to-hand combat produced what seemed to be an unending stream of senseless death. Sometimes the violence came at the hands of police: 100 strikers killed during the rail uprising of 1877, 11 children burned to death in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. On other occasions, it came as retaliation from below. In 1910, men employed by the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers blew up the headquarters of the anti-union Los Angeles Times, killing 21 printers and laborers working inside.

Elsewhere in Slate, a comment in National Review Online that the Bushmaster semi-automatic is not worth worrying about banning because it is (apparently) not powerful enough to reliably kill a deer is given a thorough ridiculing, including showing this ad that illustrates the mentality behind some gun ownership in the States:

 

If I had enough time, I'd adjust the slogan to "Consider your penis inadequate".

But one thing about Slate bothers me:  amongst all this talk of gun control and violence, they are still running prominently an episode by episode commentary on the series Dexter - a show about a psychopath made for entertainment value that has nonetheless (as I detailed a couple of months back) been clearly implicated as having inspired several murders by nutters internationally.

I haven't noticed anyone in the comments section following the Dexter article comment on this weird juxtaposition, where the same liberal leaning publication is both deeply concerned about violence in culture, and celebrating it as entertainment on the same page.

Meanwhile, over in the Atlantic, James Fallows puts succinctly the case against the "more guns is the answer" argument:

To spell it out:

• Being in a shopping mall, on a train, in a theater, or at a school where someone starts shooting is statistically more frequent in America than anywhere else, but is vanishingly unlikely for any individual. Yet if we were to rely on the "more guns make us safer" principle, logically we'd have to carry guns all the time, everywhere, because ... you never know. Jeff Goldberg and I have both railed against TSA policies based on the premise that every single passenger is a potential terrorist. A more-guns policy would involve a similar distortion in everyone's behavior based on outlier threats.
• There is very little real-world evidence of "good guys," or ordinary citizens who happen to be armed, taking out shooters in the way the more-guns hypothesis suggests. After all, and gruesomely, the mother of the murderer in Newtown was heavily armed and well experienced with weapons, and that did not help her or anyone else.
• It is all too easy to imagine the real-world mistakes, chaos, fog-of-war, prejudices, panic, and confusion that would lead a more widely armed citizenry to compound rather than the limit the damage of a shooting episode.

It is, to Australian ears, extremely odd that such an argument even has to be explained.  But we're not talking a normal country here. From another Salon article (worth reading in full):

Although the NRA has temporarily gone to ground, it’s no secret that its solution to this sort of gun violence is more guns. Indeed, chief spokesman LaPierre has made clear that he believes every American should be armed with a concealed weapon.  “Every American wife and mother and daughter, every law-abiding adult woman should be trained, armed and encouraged to carry a firearm for personal protection,” LaPierre told the NRA’s national convention, and he wasn’t trying to establish his feminist credentials.  LaPierre thinks every man in America should be packing heat as well.  The NRA believes that armed citizens in places like Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and Columbine can stop determined killers.  ”The presence of a firearm makes us all safer,” LaPierre said.  ”It’s just that simple.”

Whether or not a “responsible,” law-abiding adult trained in the use of firearms could make a difference in any particular situation is worthy of discussion.  Likewise the question of how to ensure that adult gun owners are responsible.  The problem is that the NRA and its congressional allies don’t want a rational debate about guns.  Two months after the 2011 Tucson rampage, which left six dead and 14 wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, LaPierre rejected an invitation from President Obama to discuss ways of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable.  LaPierre said there was no point talking to “people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment.”  Following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which left 13 dead, the NRA urged a similar boycott of a meeting called by President Clinton to discuss ways of addressing teen violence.

The challenge today is not coming up with “the answer” to the nation’s gun violence; rather it is to move beyond the absurd but prevailing myth perpetrated by the extremists who currently run the NRA that nothing should be done because any effort to limit access to guns will lead to gun confiscation and tyranny.

When it comes to random mass shootings, Americans don't need protection from crims:  they need protection from the insane paranoia of the NRA and its supporters.

Update:  a good article here in Salon, citing lots of academics and their studies, on why more guns is not the answer.