Response to a Gun Nutter [View all]

[markpkessinger]

I posted this as a comment to an article on RawStory.com, in response to a gun enthusiast who insisted that 'part of the problem' is that there 'really are "people trying to quash our second
amendment rights," and that the real solution to our problems was a greater awareness of gun safety procedures. Here is the full text of the comment to which I was responding (my response follows below the original commwnt):

Srilania

Some good points there. I've tried telling people till I am purple in the face, part of the problem here is not the guns. It's the idiots who've never handled one, never SEEN one, till they plop down a grand for their cool looking rambo machine, or buy a gun that no self respecting hunter would look twice at.

Part of what is going on IS there are people trying to quash our second amendment rights. Just read after ANY gun related news hits that "OMG WE SHOULD BAN GUNS NOW!" gets plastered all over. Responsible gun owners are trapped between the mentally ill anti gunners, so phobic over a machine they have panic attacks when they see one, and gun waving idiots who mistake their gun for a penis.

Proper education, made mandatory for all schools, yearly, can teach our kids to handle a firearm safely. Yes, this includes the best option, to stand there, don't touch it, and send someone to get an adult to handle it. Many of the gun penis crowd would slow their rolls, and decrease MANY accidental shootings with just some simple, common sense safety lessons.

And the worst part is, these are simple rules ANYONE with half a brain can follow.

Simple Safety rules.
1. The gun is to ALWAYS be treated as loaded. Just consider it loaded.
2. If you have unloaded all ammo from your firearm, opened the action, and checked to make sure there is nothing the gun can use to shoot, see #1
3. NEVER point a firearm at anyone or anything you do not wish to shoot. This includes checking what's BEHIND your target. One popular show, the Walking Dead, shows just why this is important (Season 2, Carl getting shot by accident because a deer hunter failed to check for possible targets behind the target of interest.
4. NEVER put ANYTHING in or near the trigger EXCEPT your own finger. And don't even put your finger near that trigger till you are ready to fire. Not even a trigger lock. Realize most trigger locks can be defeated with a hacksaw or screwdriver. Several gun locks can even be jarred loose, and allows the person to fire the gun without removing the lock. Use a gun safe, or if you cannot afford one of these, then use what is called an ACTION lock. This is a cut resistant lock that feeds down through the action, and physically prevents someone from loading or operating the firearm.
5. DO NOT LEAVE FIREARMS WHERE CHILDREN, CRIMINALS, AND MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE CAN GET THEIR HANDS ON THEM!

5 simple rules, and some simple lessons that can be easily learned, and you'll see a major reduction in this nonsense where some toddler finds Momma's boyfriend's gun under the couch and shoot themselves dead, or an adult just tossing a handgun into the console of the car and accidentally killing their son because the "unloaded" gun just happened to have one round still in it.

And here was my response:

markpkessinger Srilania

Part of what is going on IS there are people trying to quash our second amendment rights. Just read after ANY gun related news hits that "OMG WE SHOULD BAN GUNS NOW!" gets plastered all over.

This might surprise you, but believe it or not, comments made in response to an article on a web site really aren't the same thing as a serious legal effort to 'quash our second amendment rights.' Nowhere in this country has there been any legislation, or even proposed legislation, seeking to take away your guns or anyone else's. It may well be the case that there are many people out there who think we should ban guns. They are entitled to their opinion (there is no law saying anyone has to agree with any or all of the Constitution -- only that they abide by it). Banning guns outright would require a Constitutional Amendment, not merely passing a statute -- and that is a very, very tall order, and most people know this country is far from being willing to pass such an amendment, no matter how fervently it may be supported by some..

But here's the thing: if such a Constitutional Amendment overturning the Second Amendment were proposed—that is to say, if such an amendment received the approval of a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate—and then were sent on to the states for approval, and if such an amendment were then to be approved by three-fourths of the states (either by vote of the state legislatures are by vote of state ratifying conventions), then it would be perfectly within the right of the people to do so.

But what the NRA—and many gun enthusiasts—do is to conflate any and all regulation of gun sales and ownership with 'taking away our guns.' It is a belief without any rational basis whatsoever. If one agrees that guns should be kept out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, then why in God's name would that person (or that organization) then go on to oppose things like background checks? On the other hand, if an organization that purports to be about defending the Second Amendment is really about protecting the financial interests of, oh, say, gun manufacturers (despite what it has led many of its rank-and-file members to believe), well then it makes perfect sense.

I grew up in a household with many guns -- it was central Pennsylvania, where almost everybody hunted (my family included, and even I myself for a few years as a teenager). Yes, gun safety can be, and most certainly should be, drilled into any and all who come in contact with firearms. (My Dad drilled gun safety into his kids many years prior to any of us actually handling a firearm; he forbade us from pointing even an obvious toy gun (save for maybe a squirt gun) at another person And all of the safety rules you mention were likewise drilled into us over and over again. Yes, that is certainly how it should be. The problem is, it all too often is not how it is. And there is no real way to remedy that problem. Sure, you can make gun safety courses more available, or you can create safety awareness campaigns, but you cannot, under our Constitution, compel people to participate in such things. And inevitably, some will choose not to.

As to your point about not storing guns "WHERE CHILDREN, CRIMINALS, AND MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE CAN GET THEIR HANDS ON THEM," well, if only it were so simple. First, while it may seem to be a simple matter to secure guns from children, how exactly do you do that for the 'mentally ill,' given that mentally ill persons usually have perfectly normal, or sometimes even advanced, intellectual capabilities, and in many cases are not specifically identified as being 'mentally ill' unless and until they attempt some act of violence? It's not like you can go out and buy a 'mentally ill-proof lock' or something. And besides, the overwhelming majority of mentally ill people pose no threat of violence at all to anyone, so how do you identify those who should be denied access to something everybody else is granted access to? And what about those with a history of criminal or domestic violence? Those folks aren't necessarily mentally ill. Here again, background checks would make perfect sense. (And yes, I believe anybody who has a history of domestic violence incidents should be denied the right to own a gun.)

The bottom line is that although safety education can certainly help, effective regulation of gun sales and ownership is also required. Requiring universal background checks on all gun sales, public and private, is a common sense step to take in order to make it more difficult for those who should not own guns to acquire them. But the NRA opposes them. Gun safety awareness can have a dramatic impact upon the number of accidental shootings, but does little to affect the shootings and deaths resulting from intent. Banning sales of certain types of guns and gun accessories, such as high-capacity magazines and rapid-fire weapons (all such measures which are opposed by the NRA), can at least reduce how much damage a malcontent with a gun can inflict within a given amount of time, and as such would be an obvious common-sense step to take. But the NRA opposes them.

Pointing to gun safety rules as a remedy for gun violence is egregiously and woefully inadequate to the problem we face as a society. It represents a selfish, willful refusal to grapple with reality. But if gun enthusiasts continue to successfully block all reasonable efforts the wider society tries to make in order to protect itself from this scourge (which efforts are supported by a large majority of voters), then they may very well live to see the day when there really is an effort to overturn the Second Amendment and to 'take away their guns,' because the wider society will have no other alternative, what with every attempt at reasonable regulation having been blocked.

The gun lobby may, as a result of its selfish intransigence, find itself the unwitting midwife of the very opposition movement it now fears, but which currently exists mostly in the fevered imaginations of gun enthusiasts. Keep it up, NRA -- just keep it up.