Another spat of mass shootings, and the same old arguments for and against gun control have sprung up like clockwork. Since we all know this isn’t really going to affect anything, allow me to give my two cents on this issue:
Gun control would never work in America (and I specify strictly WITHIN the United States). Not only will it not happen in the United States, it would NOT fix the violent crime problem were it to be passed.
First of all, yes, it is true that some other nations in the similar economic “level” as the USA have strict gun control and have lower violent crime rates, including homicide. However, I have always doubted that this was strictly a function of arms restrictions, and any objective reader should be able to do the same, for one very specific reason.
That reason being that, if you look at the link above, the vast majority of nations in the world have higher rates of violence than the US, and almost all of those same countries have stricter regulations on private firearms ownership than the USA. Clearly, gun bans alone do not solve the problem.
“Well those are third world countries, how can you compare a wealthy country like America to a 3rd world country?!” some are undoubtedly protesting. This, you see, is the crux of my argument: gun control will not work in the United States because America is a whole hell of a lot closer to a third world country than it is to a first world country.
Or to put it another way, in terms familiar to my readers, the admonishments of America’s “gun culture” are yet another case of the smug “Tsk, tsk, America” tendency done from the comfort of an ethnically homogeneous, social-entitlement-having ivory tower. The same ivory tower that has enabled 100 years of Europeans clucking their tongues at “American racism” whilst they live in their 99 percent white countries.
Indeed, I think America’s peers in the wealthy nation tier are starting to understand just why America is so dysfunctional, with Europe having an ongoing train of Muslim car, knife, truck, and/or bomb attacks that happen almost, but not quite, as frequently as our mass shootings (as some websites have pointed out, contrary to the stereotype of evil white men, a substantial amount of mass shootings are done by “people of color”).
While it’s certainly not fair to blame all of America’s violent crime on its ethnic divisions, diversity has repeatedly been shown to make peace and harmony exceedingly difficult. And bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of homicides in the US are not the fabled “mass shooters with scary black rifles with the shoulder thing that goes up” (a fact that is always muddled when discussing American criminality), they’re the good ol’ 1v1, interpersonal problems between two people that have a personal beef with each other–a problem that is only exacerbated in the low trust society that is inevitably always created with large degrees of ethnic mixture.
And it goes without saying that the race pimps and grievance marketers and all of the many other people who make their livelihoods on keeping American racial divisions alive will do nothing to solve this problem.
But large moneyed interests cause harm to America in more ways than just ethnic strife: It doesn’t take a genius to point out that America has a massive mental health problem that ultimately I consider much more of a cause for mass shootings than the availability of firearms. It certainly would be nice to have insane people treated properly, but then pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t make their money so we just pump them full of antidepressants (it’s worth pointing out that many mass shooters have been on some sort of SSRI pharmaceutical at the time of their shooting). At the very least, the pharmaceutical companies have much more money and lobbying power than the alleged “gun lobby” that, in the minds of liberals, goes out of its way to kill children and laugh hysterically while doing it (in actuality, the NRA is essentially a corporate lobby for gun manufacturers).
So there’s your answer why gun control won’t work in America: because gun bans alone don’t work, and solving the problems that are actually causing people to snap (namely a dismal mental healthcare system, and a decaying cultural and social order that causes people to go nuts in the first place) would cost too much money and hurt the bottom lines of the plutocrats at the top who are really in charge.
As America will continue to “mysteriously” suffer the Argentine Paradox in the years to come, gun control may or may come (the importation of large amounts of the third world may shift the scales of opinion, as the places where current immigrants come from are almost all gun restrictive), but whatever happens, don’t expect the crime problem to change. Instead, expect things to be a lot like Brazil, which has very strict gun control but still manages to have a homicide rate six times higher than the USA. Because America is a lot closer to Brazil than it will EVER be to Europe.
Who else thinks Liberty is cool ?
Great article. I have repeatedly said that refusing to allow us to compare our homicide rates (notice, I didn’t say “gun homicides”, a subject in and of its own) to “undeveloped” or “underdeveloped” countries is conceding that the problem is indeed not the access to guns, rather a social issue.
When someone points out that those other countries which we aren’t allowed to compare ourselves to are “uncivilized”, I simply point out that just because the United States is supposedly “civilized”, is it not true that we have many uncivilized people living amongst us? And, I would point out that those areas where we have the most uncivilized people are indeed the areas where we have the most “gun violence.”
We need to stop worrying about access to firearms and start worrying about how to fix the culture of violence that exists. So called “gun culture” is a misnomer. There are well over 80,000,000 Americans (a very conservative estimate) that embrace “gun culture” and are among the most law abiding, non violent, upstanding citizens in this country. I suspect the gun controllers will never admit it, however.
Do bullets work differently on the human body than in other nations? Do other nations also have criminals just like Americans? Do other nations exist on the same planet where guns exist? If you can’t answer yes to all these questions, then with respect to this article I will ask only one more. Is there cheese on your planet?
Gun control is needed! How else will you hit your target if you don’t control your firearm? Of course, the liberals have redefined the term – gun confiscation doesn’t have the smooth sound of goodness to it that gun control does.