I'm going to pace my 'stance' posts to be about one a week, which is far from neurotic on my part. I think firearms in citizen hands help more than they hurt, and that our goal should be to maximize the good effects they bring, while minimizing the bad.
The goal for a society should be to strive to meet an acceptable level of security, legitimacy, and freedom - whatever acceptable is for that particular society. I gather than folks siding with gun-control don't want people getting shot/killed, and don't want to live in a society that promotes violence. Humorously, pro-gun folks want the same thing. The difference is in the means. I sincerely understand the good intentions of gun control folks (except their politicians). I simply disagree on their means.
One example of gun legislation gone wrong is the Ammunition Accountability Act, introduced to various states as a law that would require that ammunition would be encoded, taxed extra (more than doubling the price of common ammunition [.22] used for practice and small game/varmints), and produce a bunch of other silly things that this Democrat gun-owner rightly makes fun of (and he lets you know what he thinks about the NRA and Republicans in less than flattering terms).
A few things I don't think are mentioned was the ammo tax as I mentioned above. Another is the fact that it would end reloading (legitimately, although such a law is unenforceable because reloading presses aren't registered). Reloading is the act of re-using the brass that most guns eject as they cycle in the next cartridge. It means all that brass can be resold or re-used instead of going to the dump. Thus, reloading is better for the environment. I'm not inferring that environmentalists are gun-grabbers inherently, but we should all know where things like that effect our stances.
Lots of dumb laws get pushed all the time. What's the big deal here? Well, if your stance is to ban guns outright, or exert heavy control, you should know that such acts tend to spur on purchases for these things before they are banned (even if the threat isn't super-serious).
Even dumb things make sense when money is put into context - A company called Ravensforge created the ammo coding system. The company then hired some lawyers to push this as law [1]. Man, wouldn't it be awesome if we could pass a law saying that all consultants working hourly had to use JotBot? That's what these guys did. When gun owners see this stuff (and this isn't the only one), they correctly see politicians supporting an insincere move to prevent violence. I'd say a great many of the owners also see liberals/Democrats/etc this way too, but I believe (and hope) this is incorrect.
In all of this, I have a point - at best many attempts at gun control are misguided. At worst - corruption of some kind. To reiterate: Our goal should be to maximize the good effects guns bring while minimizing the bad, not bans or silly restrictions.
Just for fun, pictures of the Tec-9 before and during the Brady Law/Assault Weapons Ban.[2]
Tec-9 (left) and AB-10 (right), notice the 'now with less scary' difference.A reporter confronts a law-maker about a weapons ban that includes barrel shrouds. Barrel shrouds dissipate heat from the barrel, and possibly double as a handle. They have no impact on how lethal a gun can be.
[1] To this end, Ammunition Coding hired Briahna Taylor, a lobbyist with Gordon, Thomas, Honeywell's Tacoma-based government affairs office. With Taylor's help, they began pushing for ammunition coding legislation on the state level. Taylor quickly launched a Web site, ammunitionaccountability.com, and bills were introduced in 12 states, including Washington.
[2] When the 1994 federal assault weapons ban also named the gun, Navegar made more modifications and renamed the gun the AB-10, for "after ban."
2 comments:
I think you've done well to point out here that certain attempts at gun legislation have been ineffective and poorly motivated, but I don't fully understand it's relevance to the argument of whether or not guns should be more strictly controlled or banned. Is your argument that any attempt to tighten gun control will inherently be corrupt? And isn't that just skating around the real issue of whether or not a society is safer with or without citizen ownership of guns?
I guess I'd like to know more about your stance, and more about the stance(s) that you're arguing against. What is an acceptable level of armament for a citizen? What do the "gun control folks" that you understand want?
Either way, good post.
Aaron,
Thanks for the comment! I think gun control is a huge topic, and it's not possible for me to lay everything out without oversimplifying (and thus spurring on arguments that demand specifications), so I wanted to focus on one bit at a time.
In this particular post, I'm trying to show how gun control is typically viewed by the gun rights crowd as just a step whose ultimate destination is the complete and total banning of firearms. In short, the reason is because the laws are typically proven ineffective or coming from a place of corruption. It always _seems_ like a requirement that these laws just make it harder on the law-abiding citizens, while doing little or nothing to stop criminals.
I do think some gun control folks want to entirely ban guns, or make it so only hunters can use them, etc. I think the specifics can wildly vary on what action is desired. For the case of gun control or gun rights, both sides want to promote a free and safe society. That should be our common ground when speaking on this topic.
I have some more posts I'd like to do concerning the topic so I can elaborate on all of this further. However, I do have to keep each post at a nice medium size so I can have some good content while also letting me actually complete the post.
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