I had an epiphany last week. It occurred to me that guns don’t kill people, the bullets inside them do. Therefore, ‘gun control’ as it is currently pursued in terms policy initiatives is misguided. We don’t need gun control, we need bullet control.
My revised belief is that a person should be able to own as many guns as they want, but can only own a certain number of bullets. Since the pro ‘gun culture’ lobby tries to sell us the lie that people own guns for home defense, I think eight bullets per household should be more than adequate. That’s not eight bullets per person, or per gun, but eight bullets per household.
We all know that the ‘home defense’ schtick is only true if you are supposedly defending yourself and your family against the random, single or duet of intruders (99%of all break-ins) who have come to kill your family (0.000000001% of all break-ins worldwide outside of those who have been screwing over the mafia). However, there is another option which we must consider; that your house, aside from all others, will be invaded either by Jihadists, some good white guy who has gone off the rails, or Russia, and to be quite honest, I think you’d have at least a few days notice regarding the Ruskies. The jihadists, not likely, but the good white guy…well, we all roll the dice every day, don’t we?
Some people I know are of a different mind, and are anti-gun control. Two of my good friends are of this group. I experienced my moment of clarity while at Joe’s Addiction coffee shop during the shift of one of these friends, and we began to debate the issue within the context of the latest mass murder of innocent people by a disgruntled (good white guy) citizen who had lost touch with his internal behavioral filters.
Point — Counter point:
Her point was that the weekly mass murders we experience in America today are tragic, but you can’t go taking people’s guns away. My counter point was that if there weren’t so many guns out there, then these events would not happen with such calculable regularity. Rather, they would be, as they are in the rest of the post-industrialized world, an anomaly.
Her counter to my argument was that people will just use knives. My thought to that was: “maybe really sharp spoons, too.” Anyway I countered that with the observation that your average neo-confederate tea party nut case who goes off the rails, blaming his ex-wife and former co-workers at the office for the liberal media’s destruction of American culture will not resort to knives. This is too personal for them, and beyond that, they wouldn’t be able to guarantee themselves even the most modest level of ‘mission accomplished’ satisfaction at the end.
Besides that, even if they are able to slash their way through three or four people they’re going to be tackled and subdued by the ex-jock in cubicle 107; who would then be backed up by some other guys. Provided they can avoid this certainty and arrive at some sense of ‘mission accomplished’ (which they will say in their best “W” or Trump voice and snicker), they don’t want to have to jam a knife into the side of their head in order to finish the job. That, I think we can all agree, is a rather unsavory prospect, and how can one insure that they would do that right? You can’t practice that like you can putting an unloaded gun in your mouth and squeezing the trigger. I mean, if you miss by just a little bit, or don’t use quite enough force, you’re screwed…and arrested.
Also, knives are too personal. The people who commit these acts are completely removed emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually from society and they do not want to have to be close enough to another person to have to touch them. They reach a point of complete powerlessness vis à vis the rest of the world and the gun is the easy way out. The knife is a difficult road to travel. To stab somebody to death requires intimacy and commitment, a gun requires only detachment and defeatism.
In order to counter my argument, my good friend and adversary in the debate, sent me a link a few days later to a story from the BBC about a terrorist attack on a Chinese commuter rail station in the city of Kunming by a group of men wielding, you guessed it, knives. It was a horrible incident: twenty-nine people were killed and at least one hundred thirty injured. The link o this story appears below:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-26402367
Her brief text with the link read: “So knives wouldn’t work? Too personal?” I had no choice but to reply, and the text of that reply appears below. I hope you enjoy it (as if reading this very brief introduction hasn’t been joy enough for anybody for one day). 🙂
“You’re making an connection between this attack, and the work of a single individual who’s brain has snapped executing a mass shooting?
There is no connection. In fact, this group, and others like it, deliberately choose knives and similar ‘up close and personal’ weapons with which to make their political statement. It is part of their message to a regime they feel is oppressing them. On top of that, it doesn’t matter where you are in this world, if you want guns, you can find them; especially in such wild-west places like the Chinese hinterlands (or anywhere in the United States), so one cannot argue that they had no access to guns.
However, if a connection must be made, then my question is; “How many more people would have been massacred had these men been armed with assault rifles, handguns, and ass-loads of ammunition?” I think we can both agree that the dead body count would be somewhere in the 200+ range with many, many more wounded.
Thank God these guys decided on knives.
I think what you need to look at is how many mass ‘disgruntled nut case on a mission’ shootings occur per capita in a place that lives under the horrors of gun culture like the United States, with a place where there are very strict controls on the possession of firearms, especially handguns, like The People’s Republic, or Germany, or France, or England, or Australia.
Please don’t confuse premeditated mass murder committed by an individual who has lost touch with reality, with premeditated political terrorist attacks by people who have decided, as an organization, to kill in order to gain publicity for their cause, no matter what the weapon.
Love ya!,“
Therefore, we arrive at the point at which we always arrive when we delve into the arguments of those who want to remove all social controls from gun ownership, gun toter-ship, and gun usage-ship. It increases violence in every way and they know it. It makes the world a more dangerous place, and in large measure, makes the world the more dangerous place they claim to need more guns to combat.
Not only that, but as you read in my last post, it fosters in those who have decided to carry a gun with them at all times, this strange “society has deputized me” attitude that takes the very presence of so many weapons to a dangerous new level.
I will allow you to re-read my last post, “Execution Style,” to refresh your memory regarding the execution of Tomorio Walton and my statements on gun violence put forward there. For purposes of this post, I want to offer you a new incident.
Recently a 47-year old woman from Clarkson, Michigan witnessed a shoplifting suspect fleeing a local Home Depot. A ‘loss prevention’ employee was following her out of the store asking her to stop. The shoplifting suspect did not stop, but rather proceeded to her SUV and began driving away (with, I would guess, $20.00 in stolen goods, if she was guilty at all). The woman, a concealed carry permit holder decided to assist the employee by taking out her gun and opening fire on the shoplifting suspect.
Let that sink in. A woman who is so afraid of black people and Latinos that she feels it necessary to carry a gun with her at all times decided that her concealed carry permit deputized her to become the Lone Rangerette. Not only that, but she also felt it her right to become the District Attorney, the judge, the jury, and the executioner. In an instant, she sentenced someone to death for shoplifting goods from a hardware store.
This is what foaming-at-the-mouth manic 2nd Amendment freaks want for our country (for the world if they can make it happen). They want “The Purge.” The want white people to reestablish the 1850’s with legislated vigilantes out there shooting people on a whim. I guarantee you that 95% plus of the people shot by these white nationalists will be of, shall we say, a darker hue.
We’re in for a rough road folks, because those out there who are true followers of Jesus will not retaliate with violence. We will not escalate. At the same time we will not, we can not, stand by and let this happen without speaking up about the suicide machine this world has become; about the suicide machine the institutional church supports.
There is violence and death in every corner of our society, and those who promote it are doing the work of the world’s enemy; the desolate one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Guns, guns, guns everywhere you look are part of his plan to destroy the good and beautiful works of God on this Earth.
I wrote in my very first post that I am convinced that people in positions of power are not stupid: they know exactly what they are doing and understand fully the broader effects of their actions. Nowhere is satan more invested in the destruction of life on this planet than in the pro-gun lobby and its adherents in the United States.
Hang on, folks. The roller coaster is just beginning.
Peace and Love to all,
Niemand