I asked “why the FUCK guns are still legal in this country” in my previous post.
I like to hear both points of view. So I turned to a conservative Republican whose opinions and intelligence I have always respected, my dear friend Teddy, and asked him over email:
In view of the shooting that just happened at Virginia Tech, remind me again WHY are guns legal in America?
I just wanna hear another point of view and you usually have good points regarding that kinda stuff. But I just got so angry when I read this headline : McCain Backs Gun Rights After Shootings
I can’t understand nor accept why guns are allowed in this country.
And his reply:
The short answers are gun bans 1) are unconstitutional, 2) will make it impossible for the citizens to resist the government if it becomes necessary to do so (our framers anticipated the necessity of another revolution, it is a part of our national heritage and identity and an ever present threat to any political power that might usurp our rights), 3) will keep guns out of the hands of only the law-abiding citizens, people who comply with laws; it will not keep guns out of the hands of criminals, those who do not comply with the law; thus we could only disarm the people that should be armed, and make them defenseless against those that we would hope they could be armed against (government can’t always protect us everywhere against armed criminals).
Gun ban opponents generally strongly favor laws that would make commission of crimes while possessing a gun (armed robbery, attempted murder, murder, being armed while committing a felony) extremely painful. Lock them up for an extra 20 years or more on top of their sentence for the underlying crime.
Then there are practical matters. How do you disarm a country of 300,000,000 that has more than 300,000,000 guns and rifles? That would be impossible, and any attempt itself would be resisted so fiercely politically and physically that it would be pointless to try even if it were feasible. And arguendo, say you did disarm us of our 300,000,000+ guns…the demand will not be extinguished. Shall we create another war on drugs where criminals profit from the trafficking in guns and all the guns are in the hands of the criminals? Ultimately, the argument for a gun ban is not relevant in this country.
-T
Teddy also welcomes your opinions. Teddy studies law at University of Virginia (not Virginia Tech btw) You can email him at theodore [at] theodore [dot] com
My heart tells me that I’d much prefer a society where I know my next door neighbor doesn’t have a gun nor can buy a gun at K-Mart than to live in a country which believes in the right to bear arms (valid as the argument can be). However, I concur that banning guns altogether is likely not the best resolution for a country with such an entrenched gun culture; we have enough people being locked up for drug wars (drugs like pot are illegal and yet guns aren’t…the hypocrisy of it all).
I always turn to The Economist for a voice of balanced reason on such newsmaking events where most of the media jumps on simple sensationalism.
This article summarizes the debate at hand:
Yet some in America are reaching the opposite conclusion. Within hours of the shootings in Virginia on Monday April 16th, a conservative blogger was quoting a Roman military historian, suggesting that “if you want peace, prepare for war” (“si vis pacem, para bellum”). Others put it more bluntly: “an armed society is a polite society”. Virginia’s gun laws are generally permissive. Any adult can buy a handgun after a brief background check (as required by federal law), and anyone who legally owns a handgun and who asks for a permit to carry a concealed weapon must be granted such a permit. Yet Virginia Tech, like many schools and universities, is a gun-free zone. Gun advocates are daring to say that if Virginia Tech allowed concealed weapons, someone might have stopped the rampaging killer. To gun-control advocates, this is self-evident madness.
The issue remains one of America’s many culture wars, dominated by an uncompromising dialogue between two extreme camps. Western and southern states, libertarians and American exceptionalists believe that guns are part of the national fabric. They say the second amendment is plain: “the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Gun-control advocates note the introductory clause to that amendment, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State”, and say that the framers of the constitution never intended America to be packed with citizens bearing private weapons.
…and this article suggests the obvious to us gun-hating people: surely there must be stricter laws regarding the use of guns?
…at the least, some will question Americans’ comfort with the easy availability of deadly weapons.
Similar atrocities have happened in countries with much stricter laws—at Dunblane in Scotland in 1996 and in Erfurt, in Germany, in 2002. But such events, elsewhere, lead to the laws being tightened even further. Inevitably individuals set on committing violence find some way to act, but with such effective tools as automatic pistols available to do so quickly and efficiently, the toll may be higher. In a country already jumpy about terrorism, it is a sobering reminder of the nearness of death.
I still have no answer to this senseless event. I have noticed that the older I get, the more people I learn to love, the more empathy I feel and the more my heart bleeds when I hear of a tragedy.
On another note, after I posted my first post with a mention “watch out, Asian men will be the next profiled terrorist now”, I received an email from a journalist from Newsweek who was working on a report of “some of possible effect yesterday’s VA Tech shootings could have on the Asian American community. I stumbled across some of your blog thoughts and wondered whether you’d be willing to chat more about it”
Then I quite regret putting up that comment. Because by highlighting the fact that he was Asian, I propagated a focus on the fact that he was Asian, when it really does not have anything to do with this wider issue at hand – that 33 people died from gunshot wounds. He was a disturbed person who just happened to be Asian, there’s no further analysis required on that. If anything, this tragedy should teach us that any kind of racial profiling is thoroughly inefficient. The country became so paranoid with brown-skinned bearded muslim men after 911, when the shade of your skin has nothing to do with the cuckoo bananas that manifests on the inside.
