Guns Don't Kill People. They Just Make It Easier!

Initially I wrote this in response to an e-mail forwarded to me by one of my more right-tending acquaintances. The man is well-read, intelligent, mentally nimble, insightful, and blessed with a degree of personal charisma that is truly admirable.

He simply insists upon regarding many issues in a starkly monochromatic and simplistic manner. It’s not so much that he’s incapable of taking a nuanced view of matters. The man deals with complex legal points practically on a daily basis. I just think he believes that social issues are only as complex as we make them, and that over-analysis of these matters simply serves to postpone taking action to solve them.

This may be true to an extent. However, taking steps to solve an issue without fully understanding the true nature of the problem invites catastrophe. Such actions can spawn further and unforeseen problems while doing nothing to resolve the original problem. Ennobling the will to action over analysis and negotiation is simply no way to solve complex social, economic, or geopolitical problems.

Here’s a little bit of clarification surrounding this email. Recently I received a similar “advocacy” email from a couple I know in Arizona.

Whenever I receive emails castigating “the Media” or “the so-called experts” I go to Snopes.com to find out the facts surrounding the message. All too often such messages have certain elements in common with many of the popular right-wing pundits: they either distort the facts through omission, place the events out of context, or, in the extreme, they simply fabricate facts in support of their own agendas.

Now, I certainly don’t believe the liberal crowd is innocent of this kind of false advertising. But I’ve noticed that the farther one goes to either extreme the more likely he’ll encounter half-truths or outright falsehood.

Oddly enough Michael Moore agrees with Darrell Scott to some degree. One of the questions he poses in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE is, Why does the United States have such a high incidence of gun-related violence when other countries with longer histories of gun ownership have so much less? Obviously both men do not think that the ready availability of guns by itself can account for this violence.

Moore posits that the United States has a history of institutionalized private violence, that justice proceeds from the point of a gun. When a people are taught from an early age that justice is not to be found in negotiation and compromise, that Colt and not the law makes all men equal, such a people will instinctively seek redress of their grievances, real or imaginary, with a gun.

Darrell Scott obviously holds that religious faith is the keys to preventing such violence. Perhaps; perhaps not. Being a student of history I tend to equate religion and institutionalized violence to a greater degree than many Americans. Only recently has this country come to know too well the violence which lies at the core of sectarian belief. Europe and Asia have known this for centuries.