MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Seriousness The three mass shootings this month

Elfwreck · 04-04-2009, 02:16 PM

I think gun laws in the US are "lax" for perfectly sensible and understandable reasons. When the US was started, guns already existed. They were used for hunting more than for killing people, and they were incredibly useful. And we had wars, and wanted an armed militia rather than, or as supplement to, a standing army, so we wanted to allow some kind of private gun ownership.

But I think the commonality of guns connects more strongly to the frontier activity and westward push than to the militia. Families living alone, more than 10 miles from the nearest neighbor, more than 50 miles from the nearest town of 150 people, needed (or thought they needed) guns as a basic survival tool. Tiny communities needed all the technology they could get; guns were part of that.

(I think some of Harry's grumbling's about the US fail to notice how BIG this country is. Occasionally I think we really should chop it up into 50 separate nations; a lot of our problems are caused by trying to apply the same solutions on too many diverse regions.)

And while we've always had problems with bandits-with-guns, there was never a point where it was harder for a bandit to get a gun than the citizens he'd consider attacking, and never a way to punish gun criminals in a way that deterred other ones; for most of our history, the "other ones" were too far away to know what kind of harsh punishments were being carried out in another city or state.

It wasn't until most of those small communities had grown into very large ones, and super-cities grew on the coasts, that we came to realize that we really do have too many guns, too easily available to people with hot tempers or grudges. But removing them won't be a simple matter of "make them illegal;" there are too many places in the US where they still are survival tools, and too many people with practical, obvious reasons to have access to guns (and that's before we get into the history buffs & collectors, whose activities might fall under free speech), to get rid of enough guns to make them harder to acquire on the black market.

04-04-2009, 02:16 PM	#17
Elfwreck Grand Sorcerer Posts: 5,187 Karma: 25133758 Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)	I think gun laws in the US are "lax" for perfectly sensible and understandable reasons. When the US was started, guns already existed. They were used for hunting more than for killing people, and they were incredibly useful. And we had wars, and wanted an armed militia rather than, or as supplement to, a standing army, so we wanted to allow some kind of private gun ownership. But I think the commonality of guns connects more strongly to the frontier activity and westward push than to the militia. Families living alone, more than 10 miles from the nearest neighbor, more than 50 miles from the nearest town of 150 people, needed (or thought they needed) guns as a basic survival tool. Tiny communities needed all the technology they could get; guns were part of that. (I think some of Harry's grumbling's about the US fail to notice how BIG this country is. Occasionally I think we really should chop it up into 50 separate nations; a lot of our problems are caused by trying to apply the same solutions on too many diverse regions.) And while we've always had problems with bandits-with-guns, there was never a point where it was harder for a bandit to get a gun than the citizens he'd consider attacking, and never a way to punish gun criminals in a way that deterred other ones; for most of our history, the "other ones" were too far away to know what kind of harsh punishments were being carried out in another city or state. It wasn't until most of those small communities had grown into very large ones, and super-cities grew on the coasts, that we came to realize that we really do have too many guns, too easily available to people with hot tempers or grudges. But removing them won't be a simple matter of "make them illegal;" there are too many places in the US where they still are survival tools, and too many people with practical, obvious reasons to have access to guns (and that's before we get into the history buffs & collectors, whose activities might fall under free speech), to get rid of enough guns to make them harder to acquire on the black market.