Day 1649 - Let's Talk about Guns

A member of the House of Representatives from Louisiana and others were shot by a man with an assault rifle a couple days ago. You can read about it here. I'm not going to deal with the political issues involved in it, the facts have not changed underlying the great political divide in this country. What I want to talk about briefly is that weapon remembering the long road to recovery of the representative from Louisiana. 

By now, I'm sure all the NRA-types who might come across this blog post are readying a response, or blowing their stack. Please don't, it will not change my mind, and will only waste your time and raise your blood pressure.  This is not an anti-second amendment screed, a desire to see nutty laws as passed in Kennesaw, Georgia requiring residents to own guns, or an effort to parse the second amendment language to refer only to the presence of an armed militia. If you want to fight those arguments please do it elsewhere.

I am not particularly in favor of banning all guns, (though they have little use outside hunting and warfare) but I am in favor of "gun sanity."  For full disclosure, I own a 22 rifle or two and when I was much younger used them often to plunk at cans and bottles in the creek that flowed near my home.  After my Dad died for a while we kept his long-barrel 22 revolver at my mother's house. I think my brother (who has a permit) has it now.  

On rare occasions I'd go squirrel hunting.  Of course even then I worried a little because even someone well trained in firearm safety (as I was) can harm someone accidentally. A 22 round or even a ricochet can travel a mile or so.  It is very difficult to keep guns out of the hands of children.  I cannot remember the last time I actually fired one of those rifles or that revolver.

I'm not arguing against the case about would-be cowboys in state legislatures passing laws allowing hidden carry and unlicensed guns, though I could invoke the sanity argument. I have a beef with the logic (sic) that says it is fine to sell to the public and for the public to own assault rifles. 

It is true that of the social dysfunctions facing us in this time in the US, there are ones with a higher deadly toll than irrational use of assault rifles. For example, more people die from opiod overdose than assault rifles. But I doubt many of the owners and sellers of assault rifles care enough about that problem to help with it. With all these caveats, here is my argument.

The Argument

Sanity is a mental quality concerning guns that we all ought to be in favor of exercising.  Sanity extends to acknowledging the reality that laws allowing others than law enforcement to bring an open, hidden carry, or unlicensed handgun in a restaurant, or God forbid, in a church service or college classroom, endanger my safety and that of everyone around the gun carrier.  Laws that allow weapons of war, even those modified to be semi-automatic, in the hands of the public go beyond the pale of sanity and reason.

It is nothing short of nostalgia, or emotion, to think you can engage in the behavior of a Wyatt Earp or an Elliot Ness without expecting the concomitant mayhem gun battles cause. Furthermore, the probability of finding oneself in a situation to use the gun is remotely small. (Yes you can point to the extremely rare case as happened yesterday where a citizen managed to apprehend two escaped felons without being killed himself.) 

If you want to admire an assault rifle, put it on the wall with the barrel plugged or in a locked gun case with ammunition stored separately where no one, especially children, can get to it but you. 

To own, or to create the circumstance to allow the use of an assault rifle in the public space  does challenge sanity. Assault rifles are not hunting rifles.,  They are not your typical handguns, and usually not even very good for anything but killing and maiming people. So why allow in the public sphere a weapon whose sole function is designed for one purpose: with one bullet to kill or severely main another person so severely that they are disabled?

Assault rifles and their projectiles are designed to cause maximal damage to the person that is hit. The bullets are high velocity, often designed to tumble in flight so they make horribly brutal wounds, and even if not tumbling, they shatter and cause massive impact damage internally. They pulverize bone and explode internal organs. In fact, this is their sole purpose opposed to "normal" handguns, to create as much damage as possible in the opponent to kill or so disable that further resistance is impossible. If you don't believe me, you can read about it here.

(Now, don't get all upset and accuse me of "liberal bias" because I cited two articles in the New York Times.  I could have found other citations making the same points in an NRA publication, hunting magazine, or military manual.)

This is the bottom line. What purpose does it serve to own or sell an assault rifle to the public (I've seen pink versions for the ladies)? If you have such a deep seated fear of our country being taken over by external forces to argue "freedom fighter," I guess you can try that argument. But, you are assuming you can do a better job than the military, and ignoring the greatest threat to being taken over is the malaise of the voters or nuclear (or chemical/biological) warfare. You can't win against either of the latter two with any kind of handgun or rifle. One can defend the right to bear arms in more credible ways that the "slippery slope argument that if one is banned soon all are banned. (I always assume the desire to make money is never a primary motivation to sell them.) 

If you want to plunk at a target or hunt a game animal, do it safely with another weapon. If you want to sell, buy or use assault rifles, you are party to the injuries to Rep. Scalise. 

The bottom line: Assault rifles are intended for one purpose - warfare. Unless we want to promote warfare in our streets, we ought to oppose their presence in and sale to the public.