I'm Posting Up a Storm
So this is a reaction piece. Like nothing on this blog is a reaction piece! I know. But, for whatever reason this seems more so.
When I checked my e-mail after coming back from the gym (Monday) evening, I read a comment left to an entry about my ideas on gun control that I wrote quite some time ago.
And the comment was quite belligerent.
It ended with the word "jackass."
I suppose mostly why I take offense is because my opinion on a gun changed to more stringent gun control. And not really that it changed, so much as it was written with much less going on as a back story.
And I think the writer failed to get a few my points.
The comment was filled with a few points and no actual statistics in response to my praise of Washington, D.C.'s gun ban and it's fight to keep it from being overturned.
The writer commented that I felt that murder by a knife was somehow different than a murder by gun, when in actuality the difference I was trying to point out is that murder with a gun is much more personal and I doubt there would be 304 murders in Philadelphia this year if they were all by some weapon other than a gun.
Not only that, but if a perpetrator is using a knife to harm someone, the proximity needed to accomplish this could greatly increase the chance of witnesses and identification of a suspect.
Crime is crime and it's going to happen.
Also, because D.C. has a gun ban and none of the surrounding areas have a gun ban - or even stringent control, as can be seen in the Virginia Tech shooting spree earlier this year by a very unstable person - this certainly makes it less effective.
But that isn't to say the gun ban/control couldn't working with a uniform code across the country. And that is why I am still for very stringent gun control, and if some places choose to ban it, then so be it.
More importantly, one the studies used to prove the writer's point of view finds an increase in violent crime in other countries, while it decreased in the United States in the same time frame.
The time frame discussed was the high-flying late '90s when economic opportunity was improving the prospects for millions more Americans than before or even after, as can be seen with the latest spike in violent crime following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks which pushed the United States into a recession. The housing crunch is causing myriad more problems for people and so violent crime continues to rise as prospects dim for millions of Americans.
Fighting crime will always require opportunity for the population to improve their life through something other than crime.
Gun control can help ensure that it is not as easy for people to commit crimes that could quickly become deadly, and methods of gun control can put responsibility where it belongs, to the criminals and those helping the criminals.
More importantly, the spike in violent crime the writer cited in other countries did not involve murder, and would you rather be robbed than murdered? The writer also failed to mention if the increased broad-daylight criminal activity resulted in increased ID of suspects and arrests, another possible benefit to victims surviving any crime perpetrated upon them.
Gun control is a sticky issue and while I see it as a necessity to make committing crimes successfully more difficult, there certainly are other options that must be made in conjunction with regulation.
Dear writer had no other ideas besides apparently arming everyone, which, in my opinion, could just lead to stupid and pointless deaths among children and accidental injury by people incapable of properly using and irresponsible with firearms.
