Is the Minority Report Real?

I’m thinking about committing a crime… and they already know about it!

Created by: Criminology

It’s the Guns, Stupid!!

by guest blogger, Joe Hack

Some things happen with an inexorable inevitability, like the changing seasons or the tides of the sea or Britney doing something else weird, but perhaps the most predictable of all is otherwise normal Americans shooting holes in each other. Every year in excess of 30,000 Americans die because of guns and many thousands more are horribly injured. Every single day eight children lose their lives because of guns. Every year, sometimes several times a year, some deranged loony will take his gun down to the local mall or high-school and kill indiscriminately. Since President J F Kennedy was assassinated (with a gun) more Americans have died from guns in the USA than in all of Americas wars in the 20th century put together. Think about it. Osama Bin Laden would need to launch nine successful ‘twin-towers’ terrorist attacks just to equal what Americans do to themselves every single year with guns. Crazy or what ?

If you were a man from mars who’d suddenly landed your little spaceship in the USA and you heard people agonizing over the causes of the recent Virginia Tech shootings you might be forgiven for thinking .. ” Its the Guns Stupid !!” I mean, lets face if, if you don’t have a gun you can’t shoot anyone. Right ? But this is the big elephant squatting in the American living room. The blindingly obvious concept that no American politician dare acknowledge. Get rid of the guns. Why daren’t they touch this ? Because it would be political suicide, that’s why. There is a hugely rich and powerful gun-manufacturing industry ready and willing to pour millions of dollars into countering any tentative moves towards gun control. They see the problem not as being that there’s too many guns. Oh no, if there were *more* guns in private hands then that would be the necessary deterrent. Am I missing something ? The United States has the largest number of guns in private hands of any country in the world, with 60 million people owning a combined arsenal of over 200 million firearms. Read that again slowly. 200 million guns . More than enough for every man, woman, child and baby in the USA to be armed to the teeth. Fer chrissakes , how many more guns do the gun manufacturers think are needed (answer: as many as they can sell)

The arguments put forward, often by those interested in profiting from death and misery, seem facile and self serving, but lets examine them briefly:

- They plug into a fuzzy feeling of patriotism by asserting that the second amendment of the constitution enshrines a citizens right to ‘bear arms’. Well kind of, but even that 200 year-old document, written in a totally different world, said only that .. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”. Got that ? A ‘well regulated militia’, like .. oh .. lets say the modern day local police forces ? Hmmm ? Certainly not every sad-sack psycho or inadequate who feels like a big man just because he’s got a bunch of killer automatic weapons stashed in his bedroom closet.

- They say that putting guns in the hands of private citizens allows them to defend themselves against the bad-guys. Bullshit! The number of times a gun-toting citizen shoots and kills a criminal who is threatening his life with a gun is *tiny*. Its the exception, rather than the rule. The vast majority of deaths by shooting are accidents or suicides or domestic arguments or drunken Saturday night brawls. The exact situations where people would have probably lived if there’d been no guns.

- They say that its not guns that kill, but people. Well duh ! The blindingly obvious fact is that if those people didn’t have guns their ability to kill would be seriously curtailed. Sure you can beat someone to death with your fists, but how much easier is it to just pull a trigger ? Sure people behave badly all the time. They yell and get drunk and have fist fights. They get cuts and lumps and bruises. But where guns are available, they kill each other.

- They say that gun control would be an ‘infringement of civil liberties’. Hmmm .. yeah right. An infringement on the right to make money from selling guns, more like. Lets be serious. We all live in a society in which we accept certain constraints in exchange for certain benefits. Some people, for example, might think the free trafficking of Heroin is desirable, but society as a whole disagrees. Society says that its so dangerous to us all that its sale must be illegal. Quite right too. The point is that we do, as a society, make decisions like that all the time. So there’s nothing to stop us deciding that guns do more harm than good and make them as illegal as heroin. Right ? And remember, guns kill far more citizens every year than heroin does.

- They say that gun control would leave only the bad guys with guns. Oh Boy. Well firstly, if it did, it wouldn’t be very successful gun control, would it ? Secondly, that’s what we pay the police for isn’t it ?. They’re the ‘well-ordered-militia’ that carries guns on our behalf and protects society. Thirdly, slap a mandatory life sentence on *anyone* (other than an authorized officer of the law) found with a gun, no exceptions, and that would pretty quickly take the gun-owners off the streets. And fourthly, Oh but this is just too dumb .. you really know the arguments for guns are tripe …don’t you ?

Frankly I don’t care much one way or the other. If a bunch of gullible people have been brainwashed by the propaganda of those who want to make money out of gun sales then I guess I’m not going to be able to dissuade them. If someone has been brought up on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and shoot-outs and cowboy myths then any injection of reality into their over-heated vigilante fantasies isn’t going to be welcome. As long as they stay well away from me and mine, then they can pick up their 200 million guns and blow holes in each other all day long. At least that’s what I feel like saying when faced with such destructive and irrational behavior. But the humanitarian in me (and he’s down in there somewhere, the irritating little bugger) says don’t give up on them just yet..

So hey folks, let me ask you this before I go. When will it be enough, do you think ? When will there be enough guns ? When everyone has two, three, five, a hundred ? When will there be enough gun-deaths ? When it rises to 40,000 a year, 50,000 ? More ? When will the price in human misery become too high to stomach ? When someone you love, your child or father of brother or sister gets killed senselessly by a gun ? When will you demand that your spineless, self-serving political representative finally *do* something to eradicate this modern day plague ? Its going to happen, you know. Its inevitable. A situation as crazy as this one is can’t go on forever. Someday, and lets all hope its soon, our collective disgust is going to blow the cowardly politicians who allow this carnage right out of their cosy feathered nests. And you can tell them Joe Hack said that …