I don’t usually do non-arts-related political posts here, but here comes one, so click away if that doesn’t interest you.
The thing that I haven’t heard any one say in the gun control debate is that the advances in military technology have negated the reason for the existence of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment guaranteed that we (The People of the United States) could bear arms so that we would be able to defend ourselves against oppressive government. Like we did when we fought for our independence from Britain. This made perfect sense when the government-supported-military used the same weapons that citizens used.
This is no longer the case. Hand guns, or even assault rifles and machine guns, will do us no good against drones, B1 bombers, and F16s. We as individual citizens are technologically incapable of defending ourselves against our own military, therefore the argument that we must have the right to buy a gun over the internet or at a gun show without a background check because we need to be able to defend ourselves from the possibility of our government going bad is a fallacious argument.
What we need to do to defend ourselves from our government going bad is to quit electing self-serving, egotistical idiots who value a rating from a lobbying group more than the wishes of their constituents. We need to quit electing people who value staying in office more than doing the right thing.
Even our Founding Fathers could not have defended themselves from an entire army with one gun. And even though a gun might not protect you from EVERYTHING, it still can protect you from some things.
Agreed. And if every legal gun owner has undergone a background check, then we may have fewer things from which we need to protect ourselves.
I don;t know what everyone means when they say, background check, but I suspect it won;t do anything to detect people who are fixing to go postal.
Remember all the SNL skits about the guy who shot Pres. Reagan: Oh yeah, I knew him. He was such a GREAT guy! We never had any doubt he would do something like try to assassinate the Pres!
Re: the article that was posted on FB, I think there are stats that connect tighter gun controls laws with fewer gun deaths. He carefully chose the word gun murder instead of gun death. Maybe that correlation is different.
My response to the “gun control won’t end gun violence so why have any gun control” argument is that we never hear anyone say that underage drinking laws don’t end all underage drinking, so we should just have no underage drinking laws. People did at one point argue that seatbelts didn’t save all lives, so we shouldn’t have seat belt laws. We have in time seen that we are much safer on the road wearing a seat belt than not. Still we have seat belt laws even though they don’t save all lives. Fewer people die with them than without them.
If gun control legislation saved one life per year, would it be worth it? If one answers “no,” fine, we can agree to disagree. If one argues that gun control legislation will not even save one life per year, then one may be letting one’s ideology interfere with one’s rational thought.