Response to the Armed Canadian

I have to respond here to your post dated 11/5/07 so that I can respond to your comments as I read them.

First, I have to hand it to you guys. You always find a way to say something like "I can kill you dead with ....".

"As to guns being confiscated or restricted based on lethality, .... Such a statement illustrates that you have no firearms knowledge and do not understand that "lethality" has numerous variables." Nothing in my statement requires that I know all the variables which affect lethality. My statement is true regardless of those variables.

"What you feel is irrelevant." You referenced my comment "but surely all of you has seen some guns which you privately must have felt ought to be illegal". Clearly, the usage of the word "felt" was synonymous with "believed", so you misunderstood my point.

"I don't care how a particular guns based solely on how they appear make you feel." Again, it was not about appearance. You missed my point. Guys like you who are very knowledgeable about firearms ought to be able to identify guns that are too lethal. You may still disagree, but my point was not about "appearance" but about "reality".

"It should take more than revulsion to dictate laws". I agree. Never had anything to do with my views.

"So you don't need to worry about it. RPGs and their ilk are already heavily regulated." I never worried about RPGs. (I worry about al Qaeda bringing a nuke onto American soil.) The point was "The line between a legal gun and illegal gun will always be blurry and somewhat arbitrary".

"So I ask you, what intelligent gun laws are you looking for?" I have answered this question many times over the past few days. OK, here goes: The laws I want, I am not qualified to write. You are in a better position to write them, along with other responsible folks, and I guess you have to throw in some attorneys. But the main thing is this: it should be national (so it is simpler for everyone), and it should prevent some of the mayhem in which, today, guns play a role. (It's ok with me if the national law specifies different rules for different regions of the US.) Now, this is my opinion. The important thing for me is that the laws get improved over time, over where they are today. And it is more important that they get improved, than precisely how fast the changes occur, or if the changes are in stages, or if there are grandfathering provisions. Note: improved certainly includes removing sections of the existing laws which are deemed not effective in reducing crimes committed with guns.

Thank you for the nice recap on existing gun laws. It was very informative.

"what intelligent gun control did these laws fail to take into account?" Impossible to answer, but a mind experiment might point the way. Again, since we are delving into human behavior, society, and culture, there are no simple "tests" as in physics, no "proofs" as in geometry. But I would like to see an analysis of how guns, manufactured legally, end up in the hands of the bad guys. (Try not to muddle this thought experiment with cliches about locking up the thugs; we can all agree to that, but we need to deal with the world as it is, not as it should be.) Perhaps this type of analysis could lead to better laws and/or regulations.

"The problem with this idea is simple: What if the result you are after is unachievable?" That is possible (in a theoretical sense) but not likely. All of our laws will evolve over time, zigging and zagging, better and worse, but better over time. I find it hard to imagine that we cannot do better.

"And these ineffective, "feel good" laws are never repealed...." Like I said, they should be.

"All these laws do is move the bar...." That is true, and for all laws in general. Again, this is not physics. Laws are not perfect, ever.

"you don't "experiment" with Constitutional rights." Apart from my never suggesting that, we are constantly interpreting our glorious and beautiful Constitution.

"We've had 73+ years of experimentation and what is the result? Criminals still get guns and still use them." We must never lose our faith in man's ability to make progress.

"Until we address the base cause of gun crime, the criminal himself, we will not have the peace you are looking for." Two points:

1. I always said we have to work on both: lock up the criminals and improve the gun controls.

2. If truth be told, this is not about the peace I am looking for. The peace I am looking for will come after we have erased al Qaeda from the globe. (I got drawn into this debate in a roundabout way, but I take full responsibility for it, and have enjoyed much of it.)

"But this balance must work against the criminal and not 99% of the law-abiding citizens out there. What does it say about our society that this criminal minority is the one serving to impose legal and legislative tyranny on the rest of us? This isn't the way it is supposed to be." I agree, and I see this in all walks of life. Most of the irritating laws we can blame on the "bad guys" for not being honest, decent, etc.

"Law enforcement is the answer, not gun control. Improve that and we will improve everything." You and I disagree, but I applaud your civility and knowledge.

Gun Control Revisited

There have been many intelligent comments posted in response to my post and comments on this subject, so I will respond here to the last set of comments by Linoge, Sebastian, and R.J.

I think I have an open mind on this issue. While there are times I wish I could make all the guns in civilian hands vanish instantaneously, I know that is never going to happen.

I am particularly impressed by the points about gun demand (it is strong) and the ability of determined persons to make their own guns, or how easy it would be to manufacture firearms in one's home or a small machine shop. So, there is no practical way to ban firearms. I agree. They will always be with us.

I understand the sensitivity to registration, but I am not familiar with the reference to California confiscating assault weapons after they had been registered. Perhaps the types of weapons which were confiscated ought to have been taken due to their lethality. I think it is a matter of degree, and not a black and white issue.

The line between a legal gun and illegal gun will always be blurry and somewhat arbitrary, but surely all of you has seen some guns which you privately must have felt ought to be illegal. Isn't there some point where the caliber of the bullet, or its speed, or the number of firings per minute, or the penetration characteristics, or explosive characteristics, ought to be regulated? What about RPGs?

I favor intelligent gun control. It should at least be national. There is no point in having a state law that can easily be defeated by crossing a state boundary.

I like the example of comparing registering guns with registering computers. I actually do think more controls and less privacy is warranted with computers. Again, it should never be "either/or", but rather, a matter of degree. Computer hackers can do a lot of damage, so we need better controls to be able to trace hacker attacks, thefts, and damage caused by "botnets". At a minimum, there ought to be efforts to make it easier for law enforcement to trace illegal activities on the internet. (I am not an expert on the internet, but I know enough about it that this is a problem which can never be solved, but only managed.) Without safeguards, we can lose the internet as an economic engine, and that would be a step backwards.

I agree that having the government install video cameras in everyone's home is going too far. That is a great example of what I mean when I say that control is a matter of degree. The trick is to find the "sweet spot", not too much control, and not too little control. "Big Brother" is too much control.

Today, the government does not have enough information about peoples' incomes. This results in tax unfairness: one person has withholding from his wages, while another pays no taxes on income from a secret source. We all benefit from government, so we should all pay for it, fairly. (Everyone also has their own list of government services which they do not want to pay for. A drug dealer does not want to pay for narcotics police; a thief does not want to pay for police; a pacifist does not want to pay for the military; I suspect many gun owners do not want to pay for the ATF; and so on. So, we can't pick and choose what programs we will pay for, but we do try to voice our opinions and vote, etc.) But I agree that government has no business in certain aspects of our lives. But I don't think that sheds any light on the issue of gun control.

I don't think our founders meant for the Second Amendment to be as sweeping as it has been interpreted. I would like to see it re-written, so that it is clearer and more in keeping with our founders' intent.

I checked the link which pointed to the humorous site which compared gun control to stuff like "We need to prevent rape by castrating all men". That is funny. I get it. But like all analogies, it is not exactly the same as gun control. If you agree we need some control of weaponry, then gun control is a matter of degree. It is certainly a more difficult issue to manage than most, which probably explains why there is so much emotion attached to it.

A police state would be a bad thing. So would total anarchy fueled by no laws constraining weapons. I think if I had to choose, I would go with the police state. No way would I prefer a place like Baghdad, with car bombs going off every day. Happily, we don't have to choose between these two extremes. We can have balance. (The differences between America and either a police state or Iraq have a lot more to do with things other than gun control: for starters, we have had over 200 years of gradually improving institutions and laws. This is a point that a lot of neo-cons missed, but I digress.)

I agree that the analogy of registering cars and guns is far from perfect. But I still think there are good lessons there: cars are not being confiscated from law-abiding citizens.

It doesn't matter much what the gun laws are in DC, since it is so easy to go from there to Virginia, which has weaker laws. That is why we need national gun control, as opposed to a bunch of conflicting and self-defeating state or local gun controls.

We should not outlaw guns. We should have gun control laws which reduce the high rate of crimes and accidents committed with firearms.

I think we need better laws and enforcement in order to reduce crime. We have not experimented enough with our laws to conclude that gun control does not work.

America is the greatest country in the world. We should not rest on our laurels, but continue to improve it.

We Need More Gun Control

If gun ownership by civilians were banned by law, there would be fewer murders. Many murders are committed with guns. Making guns harder to acquire would reduce the number of guns in all hands, not just the hands of law-abiding citizens.

Guns are not all bad. We need them in both law enforcement and in the military. We do not “need” them for hunting or for target practice as a sport. Some people do need guns for their own protection, in the US, because there are so many guns in the hands of law-breakers, and because in rural areas it can take unreasonably long to wait for police protection in emergencies.

If we could find a way to eliminate guns from the bad guys, then no additional gun control measures would be needed. Until then, we need more gun control, not less.