Safety: With Guns? or From Guns?

Americans like to feel safe.  In fact, I might even go so far as to say that we have an unhealthy obsession with safety.  McDonalds’ coffee cups come equipped with a warning label, just so you know that it’s hot, and so you don’t sue them when you inevitably burn yourself.  One whacko tries (and fails!) to get a shoe bomb onto an airplane, and the whole country willingly takes off their shoes for inspection at the airport.  Why?  Has anyone actually ever successfully shoebombed a plane?  No.  Does the huge inconvenience of millions of people removing their shoes actually make us any safer?  It doesn’t matter.  It makes us feel safer, so we put up with it.

Personally, I think the lengths we go to in this country to protect us from ourselves are absurd.  The fact that you can actually and successfully sue someone because the hot coffee they served you is hot will never make sense to me, and airport security is a big reason why I tend to drive places instead of fly these days.  But the one thing that seems to divide many of us when it comes to safety is the small matter of guns.

Now, I am aware of the text of the second amendment, but I want to ignore that for a moment and focus on the more important question: do guns keep us safe?  Isn’t that why we have guns?  I am assuming here that the majority of people who own guns for non-hunting purposes do so for protection, or to defend their homes against, well, probably other people with guns.  So does that work?  Are you more likely to be safe with a gun in your house, or without?

Well, not surprisingly, the states with higher numbers of guns have higher rates of gun deaths.  But so what?  States with higher numbers of cows have higher rates of milk production, but that is to be expected.  What is maybe not expected is that the states with the most guns have the most homicides, period.  If you live in an area with a lot of guns, you are more likely to be murdered.  So what should you do?  Buy a gun!  That will protect you!  Right?

No, that will not protect you.  It did not protect all of those other people who live in high gun areas, and yet are still getting murdered like crazy.  Lots of them had guns too.  In fact, the likelihood that you are going to be shot goes up exponentially when you have a gun in your house.  Having a gun drastically reduces your actual safety.  Ahhh, but it makes you feel safer though, doesn’t it?

Now, before we go any further, I want to make it clear that I am not totally opposed to anyone ever having a gun.  I think that if you want guns for hunting, or a handgun so that you incorrectly feel protected, then you should be allowed to do that.  But I also think you shouldn’t have to take your shoes off at the airport, so what do I know?  No, I think guns have a place in our society.  What I don’t think has any sort of place in our society is these weapons of mass destruction.  Automatic and semi-automatic weapons that can wipe out a crowd of people in no time flat.  There is no reason anyone should have these things.  Ever.

But Tenor Dad!  Remember the second amendment?!  Yes, yes, I remember it.  It says: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.  So the very first thing it says is “well regulated.”  I totally agree.  And then it says people should be allowed to keep and bear arms.  I totally agree.  But what are arms?  And how do we regulate them?  I mean, arms are weapons, at least according to the dictionary.  But we are not allowed to have every kind of weapon, are we?  I don’t think we are.  I feel like the day I get some weapons grade plutonium is the day the government arrives at my doorstep to take it (and me) away.  So we know that we do not have the right to any and all weapons.  And we know that the government is supposed to be regulating what we can and cannot have.  So why aren’t they?

Well, we know that answer to that too.  The answer is always the same with that government of ours.  Money.  The NRA is a hugely powerful lobby, and they think everybody should have whatever guns they want.  Why do they think that?  I have no idea.  They might be crazy, or they might be making money off of it, or maybe they just like shooting things and don’t care about how that might affect the rest of us.  For whatever reason, the same government that won’t let me sell a drop-side crib on eBay or ride without my seatbelt on, thinks it’s totally fine for my neighbors to own AK-47s.  This is why government is stupid and needs us citizens to set it straight once in a while.

Many people have put forth the notion this weekend that our schools would be safer if the teachers had guns.  This is not only clearly false based on every statistic available, but would in fact increase child fatalities.  Even if the guns were locked up, you know those kids would be getting into them.  I had a master key to my entire high school by the time I was a senior, and not an authorized one either.  Kids get into stuff.  And that stuff had better not be loaded, that’s all I’m saying.

So we come to the final argument against limiting the kinds of weapons that the everyday Wal*Mart shopper can purchase.  If we ban these guns, the criminals will still get their hands on them, and then we will not be safe, because the bad guys will have better guns than us.  People, let me tell you something.  If “bad guys are going to do it anyway” was a reason for not making something illegal, nothing would be illegal.  Do the people trying to ban abortions really think that making them illegal will put an end to them?  Does making drugs illegal stop people from using them?  No, of course not.  It makes it harder.  That’s all we can ever do as a society.  Take something that is bad and dangerous for everyone, and make it harder to do.  That’s what regulation is.

The only other thing I want to say is, the bad guys will always have bigger and better guns than you.  That will never change.  Your little gun will not protect you.  But if guns were not so readily available, we would see a lot fewer of these horrible mass shootings.  You see, the people that are doing these things are not the same type of people that are trying to rob you in the middle of the night.  They are not going to break into your home to steal from you or shoot you.  These people are mentally ill.  Now, that’s a whole other topic that deserves a lot of attention, but for now just know that most of the people, including the young man last Friday, that go on these shooting sprees use legally purchased and registered weapons.  They are not after fame and news coverage.  They are not after money, power, sex, or anything else that you or I could ever understand.  They are mentally ill, and they are lashing out because they are hurting, and because their brains are not functioning in a healthy way.  They grab the weapons that are at hand and they attack.  And if those weapons were knives, bats, or guns that needed reloading, we would not see the deaths that we saw on Friday.

Maybe banning the more destructive types of guns wouldn’t stop a home invasion, but I would feel a heck of a lot safer coming face to face with someone pointing a gun at me that wanted my money, as opposed to someone who just wanted to kill and lash out.  These are the types of people that would not have guns if we regulated and controlled them more.  And while it might bring some people some false peace of mind, there are a lot of much safer ways to protect your home than by bringing a gun into it.