No silver bullet on gun control
How do you stop people doing things you don’t want them to do?
Making laws against the activity only stops those not wanting to be criminals, and it punishes those who get caught. But laws don’t stop people from doing bad things. In the same vein as the ‘‘guns don’t kill people; people kill people’’ mantra, laws do not prevent crime.
We do need to do something about gun control but the question is, what, not when? There is no point in doing things that won’t work, but nothing will work 100 per cent, nothing does.
Mass shootings in the United States are defined as incidents where four or more are either killed or injured and there have been 1268 mass shootings in the USA since January 2013 and more than one per day since. Canada has had three mass shootings since 2000. Why? Similar access to guns and similar laws, similar history, similar culture and population.
I was having this debate with a New York cab driving me to the airport a couple of weeks back. His view is that not carrying a gun would leave him exposed. He is not prepared to give up carrying a handgun until he feels safe and that is no time soon. Gun regulation would only stop the good people from whom he feels no threat. What is obvious is that only the afraid carry guns.
Police in the States are so tense that they constantly over-react and every police shooting, mistake or malicious, underlines the fact that things are out of control in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Absolutely Petrified.
New Zealand moved from gun licensing to licensing people in the 1980’s. For some reason it was decided it was one or the other and not both. Shotguns were never licensed and neither were Airbus. Now we have little idea of who owns what firearms and no way of pulling it back. We’d only ever get the good people to comply, so is there any point?
Last week we have seen an armed man shot by police. It has happened before and will inevitably happen again but numb resignation is not a strategy.
We can’t let the need to do something predicate doing just anything but I fear that if more incidents occur, politics and popularism will achieve just that, doing anything that looks like action. For all we know of the statistics, nobody offers any measurably successful solution. The world needs to respond country by country. For all the sensible commentary, those who we need to comply to stem the risk, will decide for themselves. The criminals and the afraid, the gun lobby and the gangs, the desperate and the stupid. I don’t know where this will end, but I am glad I am not a taxi driver in New York. WRITE TO US
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