Guns Cause All Of Our Problems

BY Herschel Smith
6 years, 9 months ago

According to Josh Marshall:

Earlier I noted that events like this remind us that America is a uniquely violent society when judged against societies and states which have had relative political stability over the last two centuries. As I noted, four of 45 US Presidents have been murdered in office and more than that number again have survived serious assassination attempts. No other countries which have comparable histories over the same period come even close.

But I got an interesting email from TPM Reader VB in Germany.

I still think the overall point holds up well. But VB notes a pretty telling detail. He listed off five attempted or successful assassinations of German politicians or high ranking government leaders since 1990. (He actually noted six but I think the sixth is better termed a government employee.) They weren’t heads of state. They ranged from prominent national politicians to people running for Mayor. Only one of the five died.

The key is that 3 of the 5 attempted killings were stabbings. Those three survived. Of the shootings, current Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble survived a 1990 assassination attempt but was permanently paralyzed. Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, then in charge of privatization of East German state assets, was assassinated by the Red Army Faction in 1991. That was arguably more successful because it was the work of an organized paramilitary group rather than a single assailant.

It is hard to draw too general a conclusion. But it does seem like at least a significant part of the equation is the prevalence of guns. Just to state the obvious, stabbings tend to be easier to survive.

[ … ]

These observations don’t have immediate or obvious policy solutions which seem at all feasible or realistic in anything like our current political reality. Most European countries radically constrain the ability of private individuals to own guns, especially for self-defense. Gun ownership is tightly regulated in Germany. But firearms ownership is actually widespread – mainly for competitive shooting and hunting.

The basic fact is simple and obvious. The widespread presence of guns dramatically magnifies the lethality of the range of mental illness, political dispute, personal vendetta and untethered anger that is more or less universal in modern societies and frankly the human condition. Certainly this would all be different if firearms were not so widespread in the United States, easy to acquire and so deeply imbedded in American culture.

Supposedly an easy analysis if you don’t roll in sin as the reason for misuse of the weapon to begin with, combined with violence perpetrated by the government (because only the government has weapons) such as Stalin’s purge, Idi Amin’s genocide in Uganda, Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia or the Armenian genocide.

Gratuitous and self-serving too.


Comments

  1. On June 27, 2017 at 8:19 am, Ned said:

    I often wonder if most of these anti-gunners are atheist.

    I’ve read atheists opine that there is no such thing as good and evil.

    If one believes that, gun control would tend to make sense to that person.

    But if you are in the world and don’t recognize evil, you are wearing rose colored glasses and won’t see it coming when it kills you.

  2. On June 27, 2017 at 9:24 am, Fred said:

    Did he say that the universality of “untethered anger” and “the human condition” “would all be different” without guns? So Gabby Giffords is our profit and a gunless utopia is our savior? The godless are always searching for Him but sadly, they keep finding objects or people to save them or in this case the absence of objects.

    He does make a good point though. It’s one that I had considered in choosing the type(s) of weapon to carry. Guns are more lethal when equally employed. But this isn’t why I carry a gun, to hopefully be more lethal. I carry a gun because this lethality gets a more immediate response from a threat and at a greater distance, then say, as in his article, a knife. So take it from Josh Marshell, carry a gun, always.

  3. On June 27, 2017 at 12:06 pm, June J said:

    Totally ignores the fact that violent crime has been falling in the US for many years. Violent criminals that use guns are highlighted in the media because it serves the agenda of the globalists who need to disarm Americans.

  4. On June 27, 2017 at 2:48 pm, Jack Crabb said:

    So, is Josh Marshall a)stupid b) evil or c) both?

  5. On June 28, 2017 at 1:16 pm, Adam Baum said:

    If atheists claim there is no such thing as good and evil, then they can’t claim that killing atheists is an evil act.

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This article is filed under the category(s) Gun Control and was published June 26th, 2017 by Herschel Smith.

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