Sunday, May 29, 2022

Uvalde Shooting

Ten years ago, I posted this:

Guns are not the cause of the problem

Once again there has been a shooting and there are immediate demands to ban guns. By this logic, we should ban cars. Vastly more people are killed in car accidents than by guns each year. Ban the car! Or maybe we should ban alcohol. I believe a majority of fatal car accidents involve alcohol. If we just ban alcohol, we could reduce car deaths. Of course, we tried banning alcohol and decided it was a failure. Even now the ban on marijuana is toppling in the states.

Interestingly, unlike the car, guns have an amendment in the Constitution denying the Federal Government from banning them. States and localities have enacted gun control laws that, oddly, seem to have the reverse of the intended effect. Washington DC and Chicago have some of the strictest gun control laws and also some of the highest murder rates.

Guns have been legal in the United States since its founding and yet these mass shootings did not happen until the 1970s and later. Why? The availability of guns is not the problem, otherwise we'd be able to point to school shootings in 1914, 1927, 1935, and so on. This is a modern phenomenon that can be traced to something that had changed in the last 40 or so years. I don't know what that is but it isn't that guns are legal.

We had less gun control in the 1950s than we have today and yet we didn't have school shootings.  Why?  Gun availability is obviously not the cause.  In those long ago days, a mentally ill person would have been forcibly committed.  We did away with that.  Could that explain the sudden appearance of mass shootings by mentally ill monsters?  Before modern media, a shooting in one state might never be reported in another state or throughout the entire country.  Might the notoriety gained from such reporting be an incentive?

Why are politicians who are protected by armed guards so eager to disarm people who did not misuse their guns?  By this logic, politicians should have demanded that we outlaw SUVs in the wake of Darrell Brooks killing 6 people in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year.  Really, who needs an SUV?  Let's limit everyone to a Smart Car that can't do as much damage as an SUV.  Let's punish law-abiding SUV owners for the crimes of one SUV driver.

Blaming the gun is misdirection.  If the gun explains all, then why are school shootings a modern phenomenon?

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