Letter to a Gun Nut

Have I used that post title before? Good chance. Anyway, here's a fellow from Corinth who's concerned that the French need to arm up to confront the menace they face.

My response:

     I'd like to respond to the letter by Jeff Collura. His feeling seems to be that the higher the level of violence in a society, the easier the government should make it to obtain guns. I believe that if the French take a look at our success with that strategy they'll likely opt for plan B. If you adjust their population to our level, they would have the equivalent of 6,000 yearly deaths from firearms compared with our more than 33,000. That's over 90 a day die from them in the U.S. and nearly two thirds are suicide or accident. Every day and a half, on average, we have more deaths than occurred in Paris.

     I agree there are a lot of illegal guns in France. Is that a reason to give up trying to regulate them? It's a border problem similar to the one Washington DC has. England, with no borders, has annual gun deaths in the low hundreds. A great book on firearms policy is "Gun Fight" by Adam Winkler. I know it's good because it caused me to change some of my liberal ideas. I also learned that "Gunsmoke" lied to us. Dodge City and all those western towns made folks check their weapons at the city limits. They had strict laws against concealed weapons, as well, and almost no deaths from gun violence.

     Interesting story I saw in the past few days is the Texas legislator who said he thought it would be a bad idea to allow in refugees because it's too easy to get guns in his state. To quote Cosmo Kramer, "Without rules, there's chaos." 

I hate wingnuts in my morning paper.


From Chas. Pierce:

"What shall remain? Ruins, thousands of children without education, so many innocent victims and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers. Jesus once said: 'You can not serve two masters: Either God or riches.' War is the right choice for him, who would serve wealth: 'Let us build weapons, so that the economy will right itself somewhat, and let us go forward in pursuit of our interests.' There is an ugly word the Lord spoke: 'Cursed!' Because He said: 'Blessed are the peacemakers!'"

Bless you, Pope Frank! You are more eloquent than even Cosmo Kramer.