To Control Guns, Listen To The Other Side

The necessary starting point for gun control is an understanding of the reasons why people want to have guns.

Why do people want to have guns?

Some people feel they need a gun for self-defense. The threats they fear come in many forms. Many fear home invasion, especially if they have small children. They fear robbery, either at home or when they are away from the house. They usually assume that there will be a lone attacker and rarely consider the possibility of a team of attackers. For home defense, a handgun is the first weapon that comes to mind, but there are certainly other possibilities such as pepper spray. An assault rifle, or any other weapon with a long barrel, will not be useful.

Let’s look at this scenario in more detail, case by case. Perhaps the confrontation is on the street, made more fearsome by the cover of darkness. You might be behind a store counter, getting into your car, or walking on a path through the woods. If you’re armed and prepared, you’ll pull your handgun from your handbag or holster and either threaten the attacker or possibly shoot them outright. This assumes that you don’t do what most people would do: either acquiesce or attempt to summon help.

The effectiveness of any armed response is chancy at best. It depends on what you’re doing at the moment of attack, and a clever attacker will choose a moment when you’re preoccupied, distracted, or half asleep. Perhaps you’ll literally be caught with your pants down.

Hunters, of course, have guns, but there’s no necessary connection between hunting and gun control. Almost all gun control advocates make an exception for hunting rifles. The interface between residential neighborhoods and hunting territory is an occasional source of conflict, especially when hunters get inebriated; there are tragic cases of people being shot by hunters in their own backyards.

Many gun advocates have multiple guns because they love the aesthetic of the gun. For self-defense, two guns are no better than one, especially if they’re stored side by side. And the type of gun does make a difference; though handguns are the cause of many deaths, they aren’t generally involved in mass shootings. For mass shootings, the assault rifle has become the weapon of choice.

The debates over assault rifles has overshadowed the debate over handguns. Handguns threaten up-close personal violence, but rarely violence at a distance or at a large scale. Handguns also need to be regulated, but the regulations would be very different from those for assault rifles. As a means of defense against assault, handguns have alternatives such as pepper sprays as even tasers.

I can appreciate the assault rifle as an aesthetic object. Its collection of intricate interacting parts is beautiful. Sadly, such a beautiful object has just one purpose: killing people efficiently as possible.

Someone might buy an assault rifle for any of several reasons: hunting, self-defense, shooting sports, collecting, just because they can — or to commit mayhem.

A different fear is that the government will be taken over by bad people and you will be outnumbered and oppressed by the Other. That fear is what motivates the Idaho militias. And given what these militia members believe, that fear isn’t unreasonable.The problem is that the kind of society they want to create is not a society that most Americans would want to live in. Certainly I would not.

And if you pay any attention to what the gun advocates are saying, you’ll see that most of them are worried about a takeover from the Left that will erase the America that they believe in, filling the country with abortionists and darkies. That the Left might win power through a free and fair election is quite beside the point to them.