Gun control propositions are by no means new, and nor is there a lack of a “national conversation on the subject.” Instead, the national conversation is ongoing, and the Left is losing it badly. Gun control advocates may talk of national soul searching and dialogue, but in truth that already exists; what they mean is that they’d like to win for a change.
American liberties, including the Second Amendment and the 40-plus state-level guarantees of the right to bear arms, pre-exist the federal government, and are defined and protected in the same document from which the state derives its authority and its structure. In a free republic, the people cannot be disarmed by the government, for they are it’s employers, and they did not give up their individual rights when they consented to its creation. There is no clause in our charters of liberty that allows for the people to be deprived of their freedom if and when a few individuals abuse theirs. [my emphasis]
The internet is filled with articles and blog posts pro-and-con gun control. Joseph Farah reports the many cases when guns carried by law-abiding people subdued robberies and thwarted mass killings. He also posts a photo of how violence is thwarted in Israel, which raises the question, how would the situation at Sandy Hook school been changed if teachers had been armed?
Ben Stein is exercised over "shoot ’em up video games online or
on machines."
In these games, the “player” just spends his whole day attempting to exercise and exorcize his loneliness and low self-esteem by shooting imaginary creatures and creating damage all day long.
At a certain point, just “killing” on the console blurs into doing it in real life. “Killing” is just what the kid does all his life. How much of a stretch is it for him to shoot into a movie theater or a political gathering or a kindergarten in “real life” if his life is so pitiful that he does not know what’s real and what is not? If you are looking for a villain, try shoot ’em up games.
Stein goes on to make a point I've not seen anywhere else:
The whole world is rightly overwrought and crazed with grief over the murder of twenty totally innocent and blameless souls last Friday in Newtown. It was and is a catastrophe for the ages. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to kill every Jew in Israel and then in the whole world, including babies… and he had his defenders, even at the Democratic National Convention.
He goes on to speak of the silence and even acquiescene of opinion makers in the United States at the time of Nazi, Soviet communist, and Khmer Rouge killings.
The ever-thoughtful Thomas Sowell has an important column which should be read in its entirety since he answers critics and deals with comparisons with other countries.
The key fallacy of so-called gun-control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun-control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.
Wintery Knight has a major post arguing that "The Sandy Hook, Ct. school shooting shows need for tougher fatherlessness laws" and in another post notes that "10 People shot on Friday in Chicago, the city with the strictest gun control laws."
In another post he argues "Connecticut shooting shows why we need to ban gun-free zones."
Conclusion: To strip the populace of guns would be folly. Further, I don't think it wise to start the "gradualist" approach by banning Bushmaster rifles as a first step to banning guns altogether. See Switzerland versus Germany in terms of crime statistics and gun ownership cited by Thomas Sowell above. As well, note what the editors at National Review write:
Simply put, so-called “assault weapons” are nowhere near the root of the American violence problem. According to FBI data, of the two-thirds of murders that involve firearms, about 69 percent involve handguns rather than rifles or shotguns of any kind. Most estimates place the contribution of assault weapons to gun crime at around 1 or 2 percent. These numbers should not be surprising: Rifles are difficult to conceal, and a criminal who decides to use a rifle has little reason to prefer an assault weapon over any other semiautomatic option. Contrary to popular myth, assault weapons fire only once for each pull of the trigger; they are not machine guns. [more...]