Got logic?
“The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Wayne LaPierre.
While I grasp the initial attraction to LaPierre’s bad guy/good guy thing, the underlying logic runs down a twisty, dark rabbit hole.
Human nature, unbound and unfettered by national boundaries, will play in America just like it plays in Honduras, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever. Which means our neighborhoods, counties, states and entire nation would become an armed camp.
I can assure you, even the most “conservative” among the framers of our Constitution never bought into that kind of scenario. As a matter of fact, their intent was precisely the opposite. History is replete with examples of human understanding and acceptance of what the term civilized means, and how it looks in practice. We readily acknowledge the Old West — when Colt 45’s were harnessed to every other swaggering hip — as a particularly uncivilized period in our nation’s history. We also view the (eventual) prohibitions against bringing guns into town — an eventual goal of every sheriff interested in welcoming the next sunrise — as a mark of civilization, not a sign that some goddamned Socialist was restricting somebody’s god-given right to carry a hip cannon.
It must be admitted at the very start of any discussion regarding gun violence, lawless behavior will not and can not be legislated out of existence. History, human nature and common sense dictate there will always be those among us who will break the laws of our Village. The price we pay as a free, civilized society is the ability to walk about and enjoy our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. That price is bonded — held in escrow — by the laws we all agree to obey, not by the guns we all agree to carry. We also understand that the ubiquitous presence of weapons, concealed or not, is most assuredly not a sign of a civilized village; it is a mark of lawlessness and anarchy and fear.
Perhaps the most salient testimony of a democratic society is the commonly unspoken but generally understood agreement by all within that society to abide by and within the rule of law. It is, most assuredly, not the agreement to abide by the rule of weapons. Yes, there will always be those few who — either by criminal choice or mental debility — will lurk just below the civilized cusp of that society, to profane or otherwise take inequitable advantage of the freedoms inherent in rule by law. That is a given, and it is one of the prices we pay as a civilized, free village. The idea is to address that particular problem and mitigate its cause in a consistent, civilized manner. Uprooting the very premise — the rule of law, not weapons — that brought all the villagers together in the first place is more than a little counterintuitive and self-defeating.
“The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”, or, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”, is one way to perceive the problem. That particular perception has, at its foundation, a guaranteed blowback: Guns, everywhere you look. Obviously there are some who think that would be a good thing, and that our Village would be safer and everybody would sleep soundlier at night.
Hmm. I wonder, is there anyplace in the world where we can see that blowback in action?
Well, funny thing. I mentioned Honduras. Guns are everywhere in that country. Everywhere. All sorts of guns. And the Honduran murder rate, (by gun), coincidentally, is astronomical. There are some in this country who will say that’s because Honduras is filled with ignorant little brown-skinned people who don’t speak God’s English, and that if they were Americans, (i.e. civilized, and possibly not so brown), things would be different. That’s because America is so different from every other country, in that all those other countries put their people in prison and torture people and have really high murder rates and . . .
Oh . . .
Oops.
Well, hell, just ignore that little bit of American current events. Just because we imprison more people than anybody else, and that we torture people, and that we murder more of ourselves than almost anybody else, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be different than Honduras or Somalia or Iraq or Afghanistan or any other country that has guns everywhere.
Of course we’d be different. We’d be civilized.
Guaranteed.
