A Kind Word And a Gun

12 Sep 2010 1 Comment

by goodgirllouise in Uncategorized

Disclaimer: this is the first draft of a paper I’m writing for my English 105 class.  It is intended to be a humorous argument.  The humorous part is, perhaps, the fact that I have never even considered trying to be funny in my writing.  Until this class.  Forced humor is surprisingly difficult and rather… well, forced…  Nothing like a shot of humility. (Yes, that was a ridiculously cheesy pun.  See what I mean?  Please don’t hold this against me.) All comments/suggestions are welcome.

Let’s face it.  As a culture, we are obsessed.

The entire Western Hemisphere is obsessed.  And the only places in the world that aren’t obsessed would benefit by a tiny portion of our obsession.  Maybe not so obviously, the biggest neurosis afflicting us today is not Hollywood.  We may have an unhealthy absorption with the Lindsey Lohans, Lady Gagas, vampires, horcruxes, and light saber swords, but that is not all of it.

It’s not sports either, even though we follow the Tiger Woods and Michael Jordans avidly, grinning when they win and craning our heads when they hit a tailspin on the court or in their personal lives.

Some of us seem to subsist on the soap-opera tabloids in the front aisle of the grocery store.  Watching the stars make billions of dollars and then fail epically in their personal life… is comforting.  It reassures us that no matter how unremarkable our lives may be, things could always be worse.

Beyond the sports gods and movie star screw-ups, there is, however, an even more massive obsession.

Health and safety.  What is safety after all, but preventative measures intended to keep us healthy?

Every year we spend an unfathomable amount of money on child safety seats, hand sanitizer and dispensers, bicycle helmets, flu shots, cold shots—all sources of prevention.  ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ is an old, old proverb, and I think we might have caught onto it, for the most part.  The problem we’re running into is the bit where we took that axiom one step too far and began trying to say the disease doesn’t exist while we work to prevent it.

Recent years have shown a spike in the gun control regulations and bans all the way across the Western Hemisphere.  The United Kingdom was one of the first to place an outright ban on handguns.  From 1975 to 2007 Washington D. C. had a virtual ban on handguns that prohibited residents from owning them.  In 2007, the ban was ruled as unconstitutional and violating our rights to keep and bear arms, as stipulated in the 2^nd Amendment.

Since the election of Obama in 2008, the idea of a national gun ban for the United States has been tossed around at those highest levels of idiocracy, commonly known as the Senate and the House of Representatives.

That amazes me.

So we wake up one more and decide we’re going to ban guns. Because criminals use them sometimes to kill people, threaten people, rob people… if you name it, they have done it.  Of course, it makes sense then that we’ll place a ban on guns so that people who are committing a felony will cringe in horror and drop their gun when they find out it has been outlawed.  Because we all know how well criminals abide by the law.

Look at the prohibition act of the 1920’s and 30’s!  Alcoholic beverages were banned.  So what happened next?  Bootlegging.  More alcohol was probably sold after the prohibition act was passed than before, and for more inflated prices, because we had to deal with criminals and the black market for our evening shot of whiskey.

This potential ban on guns concerns me more than the prohibition act or the subsequent bootlegging, because I’m beginning to wonder why we’re paying our elected officials such exorbitant salaries when they clearly have never read a data table in their lives.

Look at the crime rates for any of the countries with a gun ban.  There’s crime.  We all understand that.  Then there’s a ban on guns.  Add that to the equation, and over the course of a couple years, all of the sudden the crime rate skyrockets.  Meanwhile, our elected officials are sitting back in their ultra plush recliners, behind a small militia of security, drinking a scotch and thinking, ‘Hm, this is nice.  Europe banned guns.  Maybe we should do the same.’

Call me crazy, but it seems like the rise in crime might have more to do with the effects of the ban on normal, law-abiding citizens than the criminals who are committing the crimes.  Since when have criminals been known for their adherence to the law?  With a gun ban, all that we have done is effectively removed the best source of self-defense from the citizens who aren’t going to use the gun to commit a crime in the first place.  Meanwhile, criminals are still finding ways to get guns, and they’re still using them.

A citizen with a gun is much less likely to become the victim of a crime than an unarmed citizen whose only weapon is the lethal look of death and the tattletale approach.  Some of us are the body-builder, super-fighter karate kid types who have fairly decent odds to overpower an assailant even without a gun.  Some of us aren’t.  I place myself in the latter category.  Even with rudimentary knowledge of self-defense, I know that if I were to be attacked by a larger person, my odds of overpowering him enough to just get a head start running are rather slim, to say the least.

The same arguments apply to gun control on campus.  We all cringe at the horror stories of shootings in high schools and universities.  But why is the reaction to those events immediately to ban guns even farther?  One sane person with a gun could have stopped all of the shootings before they progressed to massacre status.  The real criminal is not the gun, but the person behind the gun.  In our effort to stop crime, we are going to have to look past the gun, or instrument of crime, and focus on the person pulling the trigger.

If we are merely out to eliminate the objects that are used to injure people, we should toss out our cars first.  Between 35 and 40 thousand people die each year in car wrecks in the United States, compared to an average of 15,000 homicides per year.  Notice that figure is homicides alone.  All homicides aren’t committed with a gun.  It is quite obvious that cars are killing more people than guns, so we should place severe restrictions on cars.  If you want to, you can even factor in the extra disadvantages of cars—the noise pollution and air pollution, for example.  So let’s all just go back to riding our bicycles and horse-drawn carriages, shall we?

We acknowledge that we have a right to protect our families and ourselves from harm.  How we choose to do that is our own decision, and should not be legislated—least of all by officials who are surrounded by security.  If the supporters of a gun ban want to give peace and love to the criminals who are robbing, raping, or murdering them, by all means, do as you please.  I’m going to have to side with Al Capone (who just happened to be a criminal) on this one, because “you can, in fact, get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

Advertisement