Should guns be banned in hospitals?

[primavera]

294. It is impossible to keep guns entirely out of the hands of wackos

If someone wants to badly enough, of course, there is always a way to accomplish anything. If the measure by which any law was evaluated was it's ability to totally, with absolutely 100% efficacy, eliminate any and all chances of an undesirable behavior from occurring, then every law would be worthless and we might as well do away with all of them. Hell, what's the point in making murder illegal? It's not like the law has totally eradicated murder, therefore, by you reasoning, it must be useless, right?

Thankfully, we do not live in the anarchist country that you seem to desire for us and laws which reduce the incidents of undesirable conduct are an accepted part of our lives, even if they don't eliminate them altogether.

I do not pretend to be an authority on gun control policy. If you do not like the suggestions which occur to my admittedly non-expert mind, terrific, I await your alternative suggestions on how to address the problem of 30,000 bullet-riddled American corpses every year and nearly three times as many gun-related injuries. What disappoints me is that the gun community offers no solutions, no suggestions on how to improve gun safety or how to reduce the number of gun deaths and injuries which, by every study I have ever seen, are vastly higher per capita than in any other developed country.

You presume that I care more about the safety of paper than yours. I will grant you, I care much more about 30,000 dead Americans than I do about the pleasure you derive from filling pieces of paper with holes. And yes, that you seem to care more about blowing holes in paper than you do about the lives of tens of thousands of your fellow citizens does seem pretty callous to me. I know, it's a cheap shot, but since you feel comfortable concluding that I care more about paper than people, I figure one absurdity deserves another.

I think our fundamental difference, and the reason these discussions never go anywhere, is that we differ in our opinions about whether guns in fact make one safer. You believe that your safety in the presence of wackos is improved by having a gun. I do not. I believe that you having a gun in the presence of someone whom you rightly or wrongly perceive to be a wacko makes you a danger to yourself and to others. I know, I'm sure you have anecdotes about how guns allegedly saved people's lives. And I can quote you studies and statistics about how people in extreme stress mostly manage to freeze up, shoot themselves, innocent bystanders, pretty much anyone but their real or imagined assailant, and the tiny percentages of shootings ultimately found to be lawful. And we can go back and forth like this for days without either of us convincing the other because you believe guns save lives and I believe guns take lives and we both believe that common sense and the weight of evidence is on our side. I see no way to get past that fundamental disagreement, so I'm going to suggest we stop wasting our time. As you say, five rightwing extremist judges share your views, so you can rest easy, no one's going to be able to take away your beloved guns until a less fascist court comes along and overturns their flawed decision. We will continue to sit by and watch the corpses of our citizens pile up because you and your fellows in the gun community will not do anything and those of us who advocate for responsibility cannot compel it. Oh well, surely the victims are all evildoers who deserve it anyway, right?