More Guns? Really!

A slightly different version of this editorial, containing a little less of the sarcasm, was published New Year's Day in the Virginia Pilot under the heading, PUTTING AN END TO THE GUN CULTURE, A good New Year's resolution for the nation would be to make some progress on this matter.


Cowards will do what cowards are going to do.

In the old west, a period many Americans wouldn’t mind returning to, the most vile act a man could commit was to shoot someone in the back. Only cowards did this. I know this from growing up watching TV westerns in the 1950’s; another period many Americans wouldn’t mind returning to.

The point is cowards look for an advantage. That’s what they do. The NRA suggests that if everyone carried a gun then the scales would once again be balanced and all would be right in the world.

But scales don’t stay balanced for long. Whether its politics, athletics, business or just your run-of-the-mill need for violence, the key has always been to find an edge.

Cowards with guns do what they do because they have an edge—the gun. The problem is that if everyone carried a gun the cowards would simply have to find another edge—body armor, a bigger gun, a faster bullet or, if push came to shove and with violence it always does, they would have to start shooting people in the back.

More guns are simply not the answer.

The solution, no matter how distasteful it is to so many Americans who not only like their guns but really like the freedom to have them, is to step back and away from our culture of guns and violence.

Many people reject this line of reasoning because—well, because it’s our culture; and we like our culture. It’s also big business and we like our business. Some reject it simply because it seems to be based on reasoning.

But there are lots of things that were once deemed absolutely necessary but we have been able to move away from for no other reason than because it made sense.

For centuries mankind kidded himself into thinking slavery was all right, even necessary but when he was able to break away from the shackles of slavery the obvious question had to have been, how could we have possibly accepted this as being the right thing to do.

The civilized world today no longer kills people for their religious beliefs. In many countries they still do this but that is one of the reasons we define them as uncivilized. And when they finally put an end to the practice they too will wonder in amazement that they ever did it in the first place.

Forcing children to work in mills and factories and preventing woman from working in fields they wanted to were culturally acceptable practices until they became culturally abhorrent and unjustifiable practices.

Yes, we like our guns but if there were a chance we might find something else to like—something just as good but not as destructive, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Cultures don’t change overnight and the history of weapons of destruction has been one of ever-increasing destruction but if you were simply looking to improve life, wouldn’t removing killing machines be preferable to creating more, if there was some way to do it.

Nations will still need their armies for the big problems but maybe solving the problem at the lower level might even show the way at the higher level. It’s going to take time. It’s not as simple as sending a man to the moon but its just as worthy a goal.

We could start by enacting really stiff penalties for using guns in a crime—penalties that would actually discourage the use of guns. That wouldn’t adversely affect any law-abiding citizen and it would give criminals a chance to help change the culture of violence. But that's not all we can do.

We can improve background checks procedures, take some guns off the market—both the free market and the black market, come up with better safety devices, try to coerce Hollywood to move in the direction of better scripts instead of better violence, try to teach our kids that being able to rack up high scores by killing anything that walks in a video game is not a real good career move but that good math and science skills will take you a long way. And finally, yes we can treat mental illness like it is everybody’s problem because it obviously is.

None of these actions appear to infringe on a person's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness but all would appear to give a person a better chance at life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.