Gun Crime makes me sick.
But just the “crime” part, not the “gun” part.
The whole “about to vomit” thing comes from the fact that I can’t get my laparoscopic adjustable gastric band around the fact that…
To me, that’s like believing you can wave a magic scepter to vanquish all of the Pabst Blue Ribbon DUI’s. Do you think this would reduce the number of drunks on the road? Seriously? At best, it would simply improve the “quality” of drunkenness. More people would be drinking beer of better repute once PBR has been removed from the supply chain.
If you were paying attention to the PBR analogy, you probably figured out what happens when Pabst becomes extinct. People drink other types of beer. Like National Bohemian. Some might even switch to hard cider if they’re feeling really rambunctious.
Of course you could ban all the cheap beers, and cider too. But folks would simply start drinking the hard stuff.
Do you see where this is going? It’s an endless game of trying to remove objects associated with bad behavior, while blissfuly ignoring the fact that behavior is, well, a behavioral problem. You can ban one object, only to have the problem continue with different objects. It reminds me of a dog chasing it’s tail. Or Harry Reid continuing to insist that people love Obamacare.
And therein lies the problem.
Drunk driving is a behavioral problem. Removing one type of drunk juice from the equation solves nothing. Heck, we tried to remove all the drunk juice from the equation and that was a miserable failure. Can you say Prohibition? The behavior never went away.
You can ban all the guns you want, but nothing positive has ever been accomplished by that. Australia did it. Crime went up. The UK did it. Crime went up.
I think the primary argument of the gun ban crowd is based on this flawed assumption. If you remove guns, then any crimes previously associated with guns will simply not happen.
This flawed assumption smacked me upside the head with a recent discussion with Phil the Australian. Phil seems to be a really nice guy, and I enjoyed a very polite and civil discussion with him online. I’d like to meet him over a good Australian beer. I hear they don’t really like Fosters over there — apparently it’s for tourists or something — so if we ever meet in person, I’ll trust him completely on his selection of beverage.
The basic gist of my part of the discussion was this.
Let’s suppose we live in Obama-Topia, a place with 100 murders per year, and 70 of those murders involve guns and 30 some other murderous weapon. Now, we get smart, and use our disappearing gun ray to remove all the guns. Yet, we still have 100 murders a year, but none of them involve guns. Yay! Zero gun deaths! But the people who have been “death-ed” by some means other than guns really don’t feel much better, do they?
My point is, both Australia and the UK have had either unchanged, or in the case of the UK, INCREASING murder rates since their major gun control initiatives. Guns or no guns. In fact, in the UK, the “gun related” murder rate has actually gone up since their gun ban. And of course their overall murder rate has gone UP since their gun ban. Australia’s has stayed relatively flat before, during and after.
Another side note, gun ownership in Australia is essentially back to where it was before the 96/97 buyback, yet the murder rate really hasn’t changed as a percentage. Huh? If you’re going to make major changes, you would expect the crime rates to change as a result, no?
So, if crime, murder, rape, assault, armed robbery et al. do not change regardless of the tools used, who cares?
The only thing that’s relevant is the overall crime rate.
If I’m to be murdered, I certainly won’t consider it a moral victory if I’m murdered with something other than a gun. If I’m the murderee, then a gun control policy that ensures I was murdered with something other than a gun really doesn’t help me.
The flaw in the gun ban argument is that if you remove the guns (or knives, or electric staplers) then those types of crimes go away. They don’t.
That. Has. Never. Happened. Ever.
Because you can’t solve a behavioral problem without addressing the, ummm, behavior.
Tom McHale was born helpless, hungry and shooting-deprived. He later discovered the joys of collecting and shooting guns, reloading ammunition and writing about his adventures with a healthy dose of fun. Tom's career has been diverse, bordering on dysfunctional, with most of it spent leading marketing teams for a variety of technology companies including Microsoft and more than a couple of high-tech startups. He's finally seen the light and given up the corporate life to pursue his passion of creating slightly crazy, but educational, content related to guns, shooting, concealed carry and self defense. 
