Thursday, April 26, 2007

 

New York Times on Gun Violence

The NYT editorial yesterday started off so promisingly.

By now, the logic is almost automatic. A shooter takes innocent lives, and someone says that if the victims had been armed, this wouldn't have happened. The only solution to a gun in the wrong hands, it seems, is a gun in the hands of everyone.

Yeah, I thought, an armed society is a polite society. Good guys outnumber bad guys. They called it logic. This was good.

But the editors were being sarcastic, it seems.

Seung-Hui Cho bought his guns illegally, though with the appearance of legality. He slipped through a loophole, through a disconnect between the way Virginia defines a disqualifying mental incapacity and the way the federal government does.

No, the privacy concerns regarding all health including mental health kept the fact of the miserable murder's adjudication and brief committal to what used to be called a state hospital for the insane, kept that information off the background check databases. No rational friend of the Second Amendment wants floridly psychotic people to obtain guns legally, despite what the NYT alleges.

Those gun advocates who believe that the Second Amendment confers the right to carry a gun in public are quick to point out that they are law-abiding, decent citizens trying to protect themselves and their families in a world gone mad. But, of course, the guns can’t tell the difference. Arming more people would be a recipe for disaster.

Guns can't tell the difference? The editors are clearly delusional. The guns are hunks of metal, they are not cognizant. Can't tell the difference between what? And the money quote. Arming more people would be a recipe for disaster. This has been said by the NYT editors about every state creating a shall issue a carry permit to every law abiding citizen who wants one law. It will be like Dodge City; it will be anarchy! Well, 39 states have such a scheme and anarchy has yet to arrive. Indeed, gun violence has declined, particularly in states with such laws. An armed society is a polite, and law abiding, society.

True safety lies in the civility of society, in laws that publicly protect all of our rights and in having law-enforcement officers who are trained in the use of deadly force, then authorized to apply it in rationally defined situations. I'm OK with the first clause and with the second as well, but relying on the police to protect you is the real recipe for disaster. They are not there in time to protect you except in extraordinary circumstances.

I am obliged to every person I meet that he or she does not murder me, to update Mr. Burke; but if I don't want to be a complete pawn of fate, I might exercise my Second Amendment right, just in case I cross paths with a disturbed person intent on committing suicide with company.

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Comments:
"...laws that publicly protect all of our rights..."

Well, other than that pesky, inconvenient 2nd Amendment. We don't like that one, so it's not a law.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
 
They really aren't fooling everyone anymore, are they?
 
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