$5,000 Bullets?

I love Chris Rock. He does a great piece on gun control. He says that we should not be worried about it, that we should instead seriously consider “bullet control”. He says if bullets cost 5,000 dollars apiece, we would never again hear the words “innocent bystander”. He goes on to say that if someone got shot and bullets were that expensive, they “must have done something!” You gotta chuckle. He has a gift.

That said, its awfully hard to laugh about gun control in the wake of the shootings in Binghamton. A lone gunman, alienated, upset and laid off, took out his frustrations on innocent people at the American Civic Association, killing 13 of them before turning his weapon on himself. How many times are we going to hear terrible, heart-wrenching stories like this before it ends? This seemingly random, angry, slaughter scares us all. While we empathize with the victims and their families, I think it is the fear that this could happen to us or a loved one that makes us feel we must do something to prevent it ever happening again.

I think a few things should be fairly obvious to us all. Someone who decides to kill people at random (especially people he doesn’t even know) must be severely ill. This was a disturbed and isolated individual, not someone who, by any stretch of the imagination could be considered a stable or responsible gun owner. Most of us are (stable and responsible). While most people I know have gone through trying times and jokingly contemplated destructive behavior on one level or other, it is our very ability to reason our way past these frustrations, without acting out in a homicidal way, that renders us civilized or stable.

Those without any direct knowledge of guns often scream loudly for tighter gun control anytime a shooting like this occurs. At first this seems like a reasonable reaction but after a while all I can think about incidents like Binghamton is what would have happened if there had been a licensed gun owner with a carry permit in the midst of all this?

It would be far better if unstable people had access to no weaponry or that we could somehow restrict them to less lethal weapons (knives, baseball bats, karate lessons). The problem is that, most shooters, this guy included, are highly unlikely to get their guns legally. That means, regardless of legislation, we are likely to see more of these mass shootings in the future and that the underlying reasons for the shooting have little or nothing to do with gun legislation.

There were 3,000 people who did not survive the fall of the three towers on 9/11 and based on those deaths shouldn’t we be freaking out about box cutters and legislating against those? Outside of the machinery of war, box cutters have, statistically, killed more Americans at one time than any other implement in this past century. Please know that I do not invoke the memory of the victims of 9/11 casually but I have to wonder if any of those people would see gun control as a logical and relevant response to the largest mass murder in American history? We have very tight rules about the use of airplanes and thermite and that didn’t stop those who did it. Not in the least.

I have to ask those who are freaking out what logical good it would do to register all our guns? It seems that this is what the public is screaming for in the wake of Binghamton but registration is, historically, just the first act of a government wishing to end private gun ownership. It is also how the Nazis eliminated those who might have opposed them before they could properly organize. In a country in which the government has killed many innocents (Waco, Ruby Ridge, Amadou Diallo), letting only the government have arms seems pretty foolhardy to me. I think that our government frequently kills people who have broken no laws and who do not deserve to die. How can we protect ourselves if they legislate away our right to bear arms?

People all over the country use guns to put food on their families’ tables and our government has spent the better part of a century clamping down on and restricting and licensing our right to do that. For those of us who eat meat, hunting is a far healthier and humane way of feeding our families’ than buying meat from feedlots and factory farms.

So, what should we do about gun violence?

Well, contrary to my own, rather peaceful, individual behavior, I might suggest that we allow our citizens to be armed as our Constitution states they have a right to be. I have two friends who have carry permits and who use them and I promise you that if either of them were at that center, I know the news headline would have been markedly different. They are well-trained, responsible, serious marksmen and the gunman may have gotten a few shots off first but, trust me, he would have been down and out long before he killed 13 people!

I can understand the hue and cry from those who are shocked by this type of violence. We all are. But please don’t use it as an excuse to allow the government and other criminals to become the only armed entities. That is a serious mistake. We need guns to hunt. We need them for self defense. We need them to protect against tyranny. They are a part of our country’s history and its future. They’re not going anywhere.

I am pretty sure that registering legal guns is highly unlikely to stop a single instance of violence. While limiting gun ownership and registering legal guns may not be the end of our right to bear arms, many of us see it as the top of a very slippery slope.

If ever I was in a place where someone was running amok with a gun or a knife or a box cutter, I would want to be able to protect my children or myself or others. I’m a big guy and I don’t scare easy but we all know that the odds are likely to favor the guy wielding a gun. Put yourself in the shoes of those who just died in Binghamton. Without a gun to protect themselves, the victims were all at the mercy of someone who was obviously desperate, ill and violent. They were sitting ducks. Without a gun, they had no choice but to wait and pray that there wouldn’t be a bullet for them. If someone there had a gun, I am positive that many more of them would have survived. Isn’t it really just that simple?