ndrosen

After the Uvalde slaughter, the Washington Post has editorialized in favor of more gun control, and of course other proponents of gun control also seek to strike while the iron is hot. I do not agree. Many existing or proposed gun regulations would not have prevented the recent murders in Texas, or various other killings. For example, banning “assault weapons,” meaning firearms that seemed especially scary to Diane Feinstein and her staff, would not prevent people from using other weapons with the same caliber, muzzle velocity, and rate of fire. Additional background checks would not likely prevent someone with no previous criminal record, or record of psychiatric commitment, from obtaining a gun, and this describes the Uvalde murderer (may his name be forgotten) and a number of other perpetrators of mass shootings.

Serious and, I believe, unconstitutional measures to disarm the civilian population might have some effect, but this is by no means clear. Mexico has a higher murder rate than we do, despite or because of strict gun control laws which the narcotrafficantes and other hoodlums ignore. Great Britain has a lower murder rate than the United States, but did so even before the British had much in the way of gun control laws, and would now even with homicides committed using guns excluded; and I have read that Scotland has a much higher murder rate than England despite having the same gun control laws. It would appear that cultural factors have more impact on the rate of violent crime, and even on the rate of violent crime with guns, than the official gun control laws. Another consideration is that an attempt to take people’s guns away would not take away everyone’s guns equally, but leave weapons in the hands of those most motivated to keep them, or least respectful of the law, as well as those specially favored by government.

Furthermore, I do not trust government always to be run by minimally decent or trustworthy people, something my friends on the Left might have learned from the election of Donald Trump. The United States, despite its many sins, has not committed mass slaughter of segments of its own population on the scale of the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. This may be in part be because American equivalents of the SS or NKVD would have had to contend with armed victims. I have read that the only cases in which planned lynchings were not carried out occurred when the intended victim was armed.

Even preventing the next would-be school mass shooter from getting his hands on a gun would not necessarily prevent him from obtaining access to a truck, and using it to run over a bunch of people, perhaps children enjoying recess, or waiting for the school bus. Terrorists have used vehicles to commit multiple murders, and can have imitators. There are also other ways I can think of to cause substantial numbers of deaths without using firearms; I trust that my readers will forgive me for not providing detailed instructions.

In short, I continue to stand for the right to keep and bear arms.