Shooting down gun ban arguments

To the anti-gunners, last week’s column didn’t go over with a bang.

If you don’t like Republicans, Donald Trump, or gun proponents, fine. That’s certainly your right. But to blame anything other than the shooter himself is beyond preposterous. Yet that’s exactly what some keep advocating.

Perhaps a civics lesson is in order. No, not a diatribe about the Second Amendment, but something much more basic: How our republic works. The beauty of America is that, if you don’t like something, you have the ability to legally change it. So, in the case of more gun control, you can work to influence the vote of state and federal legislators, as the people have done in liberal, restriction-heavy states such as New York and Massachusetts. Or, if not successful, you can work to defeat the elected officials with whom you disagree.

But since achieving those things involves long-haul, rollup-the-sleeves hard work, some want to take the easy routes, by A) looking to the courts to improperly legislate from the bench to circumvent the legislative and executive branches, and B) demonizing all gun proponents by equating them with the shooters.

Under those rationales, do we exonerate bank robbers, and instead blame banks for not having metal detectors, and for keeping copious amounts of cash readily available for the taking?

Do we blame consumer-driven capitalism when someone embezzles in a desperate attempt to “keep up with the Joneses?”

Do we blame casinos when a gambler blows his entire life’s savings? And car companies for sports cars involved in highspeed accidents?

Of course not. And for a simple reason. None of those circumstances “made” the person commit the act. We have free will, and, personal “issues” notwithstanding, we are responsible for our own actions. But for some reason, when it comes to firearms, the anti-gunners don’t want that logic to apply.

Instead, their answer is to penalize law-abiding gun owners. But why? Without question, 99.9 percent of gun owners do not commit crimes with their firearms. That’s a staggeringly large number of people, since at least half of all 330 million Americans own (upwards of 400 million) guns.

According to the FBI, out of 10,265 homicides-by-firearm in 2018, a total of 297 people were killed by rifles. That’s not a misprint. Just 297. That’s less than 3 percent! Does any reasonable person believe the solution is to penalize the many to stop the few? And when the shootings don’t stop (and they won’t), the next call will be to ban shotguns. Then handguns. And even BB guns.

But that’s not the full picture. Here’s the statistic that truly matters:

On the low side, there are five million AR-15 style rifles in America (though the figure is almost certainly double or triple that). Do the math, and you discover an infinitesimally small number of rifle-homicides versus rifles: .00594 percent. For the armchair critics in the cheap seats, that’s five-thousandths of 1 percent. So, armed with that indisputable information, how can anyone argue with a straight face that banning such guns will accomplish anything, except making a few extremists feel good about themselves?

Furthering the point of accountability, let’s not forget the events leading up to the Sandy Hook school tragedy. The shooter murdered his own mother (a serious crime), and stole her guns (another crime) before he entered the school to commit his heinous act. Even Connecticut’s stringent gun laws couldn’t prevent that massacre.

Some naively believe that had there been gun bans in place, mass shooters would have shelved their killing spree plans in favor of resuming a “normal” life of college, cookouts and ball games. But in real life, when disturbed people finally snap, content with never seeing another sunrise, they become almost unstoppable -- and no gun law will thwart them from carrying out their “vision.” As terrorists have proven, people can be murdered by mowing them down in a car or truck.

An assault weapon ban would serve only to make the naive feel good because “they did something.” Impossible as a mass shooter’s motivations are to comprehend, we cannot push for the wrong things in our quest to explain an unexplainable evil, especially because it won’t solve the problem.

Instead, we need to addresswhat changed so radically from just a few short decades ago, when there were virtually no mass shootings, to a time of regularly-occurring massacres.

If we don’t, the next tragedy will be upon us faster than a speeding bullet.