Tea Party Senator: Keeping Guns From ‘Demented Individuals’ Will ‘Restrict Our Freedoms’

[primavera]

83. Sure, I'll go along with that

There certainly are a great many causes underlying gun violence, if I have given a different impression, I apologize for the misunderstanding. And I agree entirely that those underlying contributors need to be addressed as well. My main concern about guns is that, at 30,000 deaths per year, we simply aren't ready for prime time; that, for whatever reasons, our culture cannot be trusted to handle guns responsibly, anymore than an infant can be trusted with a hand grenade.

I'm less sure whether more guns directly cause more gun violence or not - it's honestly kind of hard to tell when there are so many guns out there already. I mean, if the number of guns in American increases from 250 million to 300 million, would you necessarily expect to see an increase in gun violence? Either way, it's still one hell of a lot of guns - we've already got ten times the number of guns in the country needed to carry out the annual bloodbaths we are witnessing. With the country so inundated already with guns, and having been so inundated with guns for so long, I would imagine that it would be difficult to find data in this country that would demonstrate a correlation one way or another between the number of guns on the streets and the number of gun deaths. For that, I can only look to the experience of other countries that, through stricter gun control laws, have succeeded in gradually reducing the number of guns and, perhaps more importantly, in instilling in their populations' gun owners a profound sense of personal responsibility for their decision to keep and bear arms that is so conspicuously absent in this country. Those countries can now boast per capita gun death rates that are but a tiny fraction of what ours is. Admittedly, those other countries have very different prevailing economic and cultural conditions, so the extent to which their experience is directly comparable is open to dispute. But the vast difference between their gun death rates and ours suggest that, at the very least, it's worth examining closely, and perhaps emulating.