New York Shooting Is Yet Another Failure For Gun Control
Rick at HolyCoast hits the nail on the head when it comes to what will be an inevitable demand for more gun control following this week’s shooting spree.
The events are probably still too fresh for the usual political response, but I fully expect that by sometime this weekend either a prominent member of the Obama administration, a congressperson (likely from New York) or a NY state politician will come out demanding that the only reasonable answer to this shooting is more gun control.
Of course, New York State already has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, as do many other major cities with skyrocketing numbers of gun deaths. Gun control as envisioned by Democrats doesn’t work. Making guns legally hard to own simply makes it hard for good citizens to get them. It doesn’t even slow down the bad guys.
It’s a cliched saying in the gun control debate, but it’s worth bringing up again: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
A gun is just a means to an end. Removing that means doesn’t mean the person seeking the end can’t find other means. And then there’s the simple reality that guns actually exist in our society, will continue to exist regardless of how difficult we make it to purchase, own and use them and would continue to exist even if we removed the 2nd amendment from the constitution and went to an outright ban.
Because the sort of people who would use them for crimes (or would sell them to good citizens gone on a criminal bent) aren’t the sort to care about whether or not the government has banned or regulated guns.
We’re better off looking at why people commit crimes like the one we’ve just seen in New York, as opposed to debating the tool they happened to use to commit that crime.
