Stop and think - and you will realise that banning guns is a waste of time

[-:Undertaker:-]

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

Stop and think - and you will realise that banning guns is a waste of time

Ask yourself this. Even if you had a house full of guns and ammunition, would you then murder a close relative, shoot your way into a nearby primary school and massacre as many children as you could? Of course you wouldn’t.

You would have to be mad to do such a thing, and mad in a rather special way. And if you were mad in that way, and had no gun, you might use other weapons. There are recent instances in various parts of the world of what appear to be attempted mass murder by car, or by knife.

Take what happened just over a week ago in Chenpeng village school, Henan province, in China. Min Yongjun stabbed an elderly woman before hurting 22 children (many very badly) with a kitchen knife.

So shall we ban kitchen knives? Or cars? Actually, most mass attacks in China – which like almost all despotisms has very tight gun laws – are done with either knives or explosives.

The important thing is that these attacks still happen even with gun laws. What I am asking you to do here is to think. Don’t be herded into the standard liberal opinion, that the Sandy Hook School tragedy is the fault of America’s allegedly crazy gun laws.

Actually, Connecticut’s gun laws are a good deal tighter than Britain’s were before 1920. British gun law before then was so relaxed it made Texas look effeminate. Did the streets of Edwardian London echo to gunfire? Were school massacres common? No.

Were guns restricted here because of crime? No, they were restricted because the panicky British government thought there might be a revolution.

In Switzerland, to this day, most homes contain powerful military weapons and ammunition.

But gun crime is extremely rare there (unless you count suicide). Yet these massacres are a feature of modern life. They happen in countries such as Britain and Germany that already have severe gun laws.

Guns have been around for centuries, and high-capacity magazines have been around for decades. Guns in general are more controlled than ever. So a thinking person must look somewhere else for an explanation.

While the BBC and the papers have raged about guns, nobody has looked at the people who did the murders. There has been no great pressure to find out about Adam Lanza. Most reports make it plain that he was in some way mentally abnormal. Some suggest he may have been on one of the many powerful and poorly tested ‘medications’ that modern medicine casually inflicts on bored children who fidget in class, or on people who are just unhappy in various ways. There is, as yet, no clear answer. There may never be, as the authorities and the media just aren’t interested enough.

One of the Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris, was on such medication (as we know thanks to a Freedom of Information inquiry), and the other, Dylan Klebold, may have been taking mind-altering pills at some point before he acted, though his medical records are sealed – inexplicably, given the importance of the information. In many other similar massacres, pills are involved – Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’.

So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Then there are the illegal drugs that have been effectively decriminalised in much of the USA and Britain, especially supposedly ‘peaceful’ cannabis, now increasingly correlated with severe mental illness. ‘Medical Marijuana’, in effect the lawful sale of dope on medical pretexts, became legal in Connecticut earlier this year. Funny that, as we panic about guns we get laxer about mind-altering drugs.

Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered six people in Tucson, Arizona, had at one time been a heavy cannabis user. And then of course there’s our old friend ‘care in the community’, under which people with quite severe problems are pushed out on to the streets so that mental hospitals can be closed and sold, and their staff made redundant.

There you have it. You, and MPs, and the media, can choose to think seriously about this subject. Or we can run with the flock bleating for tougher gun laws – and then wonder why it is that the massacres keep happening anyway.

I had been waiting for Hitchens to comment on this as I knew what he'd touch upon (the drugs). So to all those wanting to look for something to ban, maybe, given the record, you ought to look elsewhere other than guns. A bit of thinking wouldn't go amiss.

Thoughts?

[FlyingJesus]

[Chippiewill]

Take what happened just over a week ago in Chenpeng village school, Henan province, in China. Min Yongjun stabbed an elderly woman before hurting 22 children (many very badly) with a kitchen knife.

So shall we ban kitchen knives? Or cars? Actually, most mass attacks in China – which like almost all despotisms has very tight gun laws – are done with either knives or explosives.

Well, you could hurt them a whole lot more if you used a gun.

[Kardan]

Ask yourself this. Even if you had a house full of guns and ammunition, would you then murder a close relative, shoot your way into a nearby primary school and massacre as many children as you could? Of course you wouldn’t.

You would have to be mad to do such a thing

I stopped reading there to be honest. 'Of course you wouldn't is absolutely ridiculous, and then 'You would have to be mad to do such a thing...', well, yes, most people that do murder many people usually are mad.

This one dude's point of view won't change my views on it. Using the argument 'But knives kill more people, so lets ban them' is stupid, and I know Undertake, you use it quite often, because you always like to bring in banning homosexuality and sex in general. We're talking about things that are used to mainly murder people and have no other use in society today. Kitchen knives for example, 99.999...% of the time, they are used in the kitchen as expected. Same for cars, not many people go on a murderous rampage compared to the amount that use them everyday for transport. Guns however, well, what other uses are there except for injuring/killing.

This is quite an old debate really. Many more people are anti-guns, but there will be a few that support it, and so be it

[Chippiewill]

Guns however, well, what other uses are there except for injuring/killing.

sport. That is of course not an argument for fully automatic or concealable weapons, which is precisely what is restricted in the UK.

[Kardan]

sport. That is of course not an argument for fully automatic or concealable weapons, which is precisely what is restricted in the UK.

Then allow guns for regulated sport, just like cars are allowed for driving I don't think people would be too happy with free use on guns when you have stupid teenagers that have played COD all there lives deciding to snipe people from their council flat.

[Chippiewill]

Then allow guns for regulated sport, just like cars are allowed for driving

Exactly, and it's what we in the UK already have. Other than short-barrel pistol shooting all sporting shooting is free to be done in the UK.

I don't think people would be too happy with free use on guns when you have stupid teenagers that have played COD all there lives deciding to snipe people from their council flat.

There is no link between computer game violence and real world violence, regardless of how much the NRA would like to pretend there is.

[Kardan]

Exactly, and it's what we in the UK already have. Other than short-barrel pistol shooting all sporting shooting is free to be done in the UK.


There is no link between computer game violence and real world violence, regardless of how much the NRA would like to pretend there is.

There probably isn't now, since teenagers can't freely get their hands on guns, but if guns were made legal? Who knows. All I know is, I would rather have an intruder in my house come at me with a knife, rather than point a gun at me.

[Chippiewill]

There probably isn't now, since teenagers can't freely get their hands on guns.

In America many teenagers can freely get their hands on guns since their parents don't restrict their access to them.

[Kardan]

In America many teenagers can freely get their hands on guns since their parents don't restrict their access to them.

Fair point My point was an assumption, so I didn't expect it to be right

I'd also like to prove this whole 'Switzerland has guns, and they're okay about it' thing...

Let's look at the number of gun crime fatalities per 100,000 people:

United States: 10.2
Switzerland: 3.5
United Kingdom: 0.25

Of course, this counts suicides, and as the article quoted, lets just not count them:

United States: 3.7
Switzerland: 0.52
United Kingdom: 0.04