I can’t call anything the dumbest possible reason for trying to justify an assault weapon ban, but mostly because anti-Second Amendment folks seem bound and determined to take that as a challenge and roll out an even stupider one.
However, I can still point out where the bar is at a given point in time, and ladies and gentlemen, we have officially hit a whole new low.
I get that not everyone favors modern sporting rifles even existing, much less being protected by the Second Amendment, but the truth is that they do, and they are.
Yet if you’re going to try to convince me that a ban is justified, you have to do better than this.
Imagine a person making the decision to die by suicide via jumping off a bridge. Successful attempt or not, who is responsible in this scenario? The person? They simply fall. The bridge? It is just doing its job. The factor that is truly bringing that person’s life to a end? Gravity.
That person, even if they lack any knowledge of what gravity is or how it works, has an inherent knowledge that jumping equals falling. And that knowledge is true because of gravity. Not jumping. Not the impact. Not the water. The individual’s decision is executed by an additional factor.
It almost sounds like I am in agreement with the “Guns don’t kill…” statement. But wait. According to my previous paragraph, it’s not the person or the gun. So who is it? That is a matter of deeper study (and a much longer writing piece).
What I can state is studies show that even the least bit of resistance (in the form of a barrier) causes a decrease in the likelihood of someone following through with the decision to jump from a bridge. This could be a fence and/or a net. Even a failed attempt can result in the decision not to not try again — also backed by research.
So the correlation; if guns weren’t so easily accessible, the decision to harm others could still be made, but without the additional factor present. Even if they chose a knife-bat-etc., these are far less lethal and much easier for the everyday citizen — children included — to defend themselves from.
So his “correlation” is really him comparing apples to oranges, and then expecting you to swallow that they’re both bananas.
First, any claim that violent crime isn’t the responsibility of the person–or even suicide, for that matter–is asinine and assumes facts not in existence. If someone makes a decision to take their own life, it is an act that they personally decide to undertake. You can’t try to manipulate it to somehow remove that responsibility.
Second, suicides and violent crime involving a firearm only share the use of a firearm as a common factor. Otherwise, they’re rarely anything alike.
Having a fence or a barrier might prevent people from jumping off a bridge, but there’s no black market out there for bridges. There’s also no evidence to suggest that someone might go to another place, one that lacks that kind of protection, to jump from there instead. Nor is there any to suggest that they won’t look at another method of taking their own life.
But violent crime is quite different. Again, there’s a black market for guns that doesn’t exist for bridges or other high places. There are 400 million guns estimated to be in private hands in the United States. Not all of them are in the hands of responsible gun owners, unfortunately, which means many are traded back and forth by criminals who care nothing at all about the laws designed to keep them disarmed.
Further, this whole argument revolves around a ban on so-called assault weapons, which aren’t used for crime all that often in the first place, and while mass murders are high profile, they’re also pretty rare, and don’t actually require something like an AR-15 to carry out. The worst school shooting in American history is still Virginia Tech, which involved a couple of handguns.
Even if we were to make so-called assault weapons really hard to get, though, the reality is that there are millions in circulation, and they will be stolen and sold to those who want to do awful things. Those who don’t know how to get one of those, though, will simply use another kind of gun. Again, to visit the author’s idiotic analogy, it’s the equivalent of not being able to access the ledge on a bridge and going to a cliff instead.
Honestly, everything about this so-called argument falls into the active-stupid category. It’s absolutely idiotic to keep claiming that gun control will make it harder for bad actors to get guns when we already know that they’re not getting guns through otherwise lawful means.
And again, trying to compare it to suicide is dumb, but even dumber to pretend it’s not an individual who is responsible.
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