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Gun Control-The Farsighted versuses The Nearsighted

© Glenn Hameroff

Gun Control-The Farsighted versuses The Nearsighted.

A six year old shoots a six year old! A deranged individual goes on a mission to kill "white devils!" When will enough be enough? I feel the veins in my neck about to explode when I visualize Charlton Heston saying, "six year olds kill, not guns." I wonder if he would feel that way if the little girl were his grand daughter? I better count to ten and do some diaphragmatic breathing or I am going to have a cerebral hemorrhage on my next keystroke. (Sort of a bizarre quid pro quo- stroke for stroke.) After spending twenty years teaching an ethics course, I am violating one of my cardinal principles- to remain emotionally cool.

During the course of my teaching career, I encouraged my students to build a "bridge for communications" with their opponents. No matter how hot the issue, avoid emotional, non-reflective responses composed in a vacuum. My students were expected to engage in a process I referred to as "falsification." Much to their collective dismay, I would entreat them to become their opponents and invest considerable mental energy defending the arguments they were firmly against. Despite, my outburst, I am going to role model the process and hopefully gain perspective on the arguments of the anti-gun control lobby.

Guns do not cause crime. Crime is a product of a complex mix of socio-economic factors. You cannot draw a statistically reliable connection between changes in gun ownership patterns and the homicide rate. Case in point, during the first thirty years of the Twentieth century, gun ownership per capita remained relatively stable in the United States, but the homicide rate increased tenfold. Conversely, during the period 1937-63, handgun ownership rose 250 percent and the homicide rate dropped by 35.7 percent.

Given the existence of somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and forty million guns currently in the hands of the public-registration or confiscation becomes an overwhelming task. Gun ownership advocates frequently draw upon America's social experiment with Alcohol Prohibition to support of the immensity of the undertaking. And as was the case with Prohibition, the gun owners will not be a cooperative or receptive audience. Our prisons are bursting at the seams; do we need recalcitrant gun owners added to the world's largest prison population? [Trust The People: The Case Against Gun Control- http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa109.html ]

If we pass new and extensively invasive gun control legislation, who will most likely comply with the law. An appropriate analogy would be the minister's stern lecture to the assembled congregation about the serious decline in regular church attendance. Consider the following: 1 in 400 handgun owners use their guns to commit crimes and 1 in 3600 use their guns to commit homicide. In addition, even in the states with the toughest hand gun regulation, surveys of prison populations report that 90% of the inmates claim that could get a hand gun with no or only a little trouble. A sociopath is very unlikely to register or surrender his/her cache of weapons? [ Policy.Com-The Issue of the Week- Gun Control-http://www.policy.com/issuewk/96/0930/ ]

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