Another knee-jerk response to a tragedy

Once again, a much damaged person has perpetrated a tragedy.

I don’t know what caused a disturbed young man to dress up like a would-be warrior wannabe, take weapons from his divorced mother’s home, shoot her and then go to a school and slaughter more than 25 other people, most of them small children.

I don’t have that answer and I don’t claim to have the answer. Having said that, however, I am once again dismayed by the near-Pavlovian conditioned-response to this tragedy. (For those who are unfamiliar with the concept Pavlovian response, it refers to a Russian psychologist who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell)

Liberals and progressives in the United States hear about such a tragedy and immediately the call goes up for the federal government to institute some new form of gun control (preferably, I think, banning all firearms) in almost a knee-jerk response to the incident.

I guess you could try to ban all firearms in the United States, but it wouldn’t work and probably would ignite a real civil war. First of all, there are far too many in circulation to be able to confiscate them all. Second, there are legitimate uses for civilians to have firearms (despite what city-folk may think). Third, firearms are far too simple to make to really effectively ban them.

So, as a practical matter, banning them is impossible.

Registering them, as our neighbor Canada has learned recently, basically becomes a rather expensive bureaucratic boondoggle and is easily evaded, if not ignored.

I guess you could try banning the sale of ammunition, but that too would easily be evaded and a black market created that would rival the illicit drug market. Gunpowder is relatively easy to mix up and the world is full of arms manufacturers willing to sell bullets to anybody.

The problem with gun control, in my humble opinion, is that it comes at the problem from the wrong angle.

It would seem obviously that the problem with guns is keeping them out of the hands of people who would use them for purposes that are not socially acceptable. How do you keep anything out of the hands of anybody who might use the thing for purposes other than socially acceptable?

Of course, to liberals and progressives, there are no socially acceptable uses for firearms, which is why they want to ban them. Unfortunately, as pointed out, that really is not an option and so to propose it merely obscures what can be done.

Now, first of all guns are inherently dangerous, but then so are cars, knives, saws, axes and just about anything else that can kill or injure human beings as well as other living creatures.

Second, guns usually are scary. They make loud noises that tend to startle and scare people, especially when you are not expecting to hear such a noise.

So, the problem is: How do you keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them? I guess the same way you keep knives out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them or axes or even cars. What, you say, but that is impossible. Yes, it is and we shouldn’t delude ourselves that it is.

What should be done then? To be honest, I don’t have a politically correct answer for that. There is a totally politically incorrect organization in Nevada that is offering to train three adults at every school in the nation in the safe handling of firearms for defensive purposes. Not that that would ever happen, but it does offer an alternative solution that probably would be much more effective than trying to ban all firearms.

Unfortunately, there really is no way to stop people from doing this or any other terrorist-type act, especially if they intend to die in the end. You can drive yourself crazy trying to understand such people or why they choose to do what they do, but you will never understand.

Note that in China, there have been at least a half-dozen similar mass attacks on schools in the last two years.