As we struggle to enact legislation to address gun violence in America, it looks like Canada is preparing to repeal elements of the the Firearms Act of 1995 and undo the Canadian Firearms Registry System that was created in 2003. The gun restrictions in Canada have reduced suicides by 48 percent, and 74% of all firearm-related deaths in Canada are suicides.
If you don’t follow David Waldman’s twitter feed, you should. He links to every article he can find on gun violence, with a special focus on accidental deaths. He’s also utilizing the #GunFAIL hashtag, which you can also follow. Sometimes I want to remove David from my feed because it’s just a relentless stream of senseless tragedy and it makes me sad and frustrated. But that’s the point.
One side keeps talking about their rights and liberties, but those rights and liberties are causing a ridiculous body count. By Waldman’s estimate, this weekend saw a 3 year old wounded in Ohio, a 7 year old killed in Kansas, 13 year old killed in Florida, a 6 year old wounded in Texas, and a 9 year old killed in Oregon. And that’s just a preliminary count of the kids who died in the last two days.
What about those kids’ right to life?
I understand that people want to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, but they should acknowledge that those of us that are looking to do something legislatively about gun violence are trying to save people’s lives. How we can best do that without infringing on anyone’s rights is what this debate should be all about.
Waldman’s GunFAIL feed is indeed distressing, but if you REALLY wanna feel bad, subscribe to Philadelphia Gun Crisis.
We don’t know when to stop…
Yep.
…and you know that by the end of the week, we’ll have 5-10 more people wounded or killed.
Layered into the argument somewhere has to be society’s rights. And with that a recognition that there is no single silver bullet to end the suicides, the mass slayings, the intimidation and the sheer violence.
That said, every time a gun enters the equation the financial cost we all have to bear in order to pick up the pieces never gets talked about. Schools, grocery stores, neighborhoods, you name it, all hit hard financially.
So the Senate debates the edges of background checks. How about revisiting a tax on ammunition? If it’s too intrusive to go after the hunters’ shells, tweak the concept to incorporate a graduated tax…the shotgun shells a plug nickel up to the big clips in line with Chris Rock’s $1,000 idea? The tax can be Federal & State. Each state could opt in or out, at whatever rate they decided.
Yes, it’s debate’s about saving lives, but we are impacted across the board and guns and their ammo are the nexus of this attack on our quality of life.
Personally, I don’t feel we should be getting involved preventing people from taking their own lives or getting themselves killed. For one, I think forcing someone to live is just insane. If someone wants to end their own life that’s a personal decision. And while we should offer any help we want, we shouldn’t try and stop them from doing it in the manner of their choosing.
On “accidental deaths”, I don’t think that’s much of an issue either. Swimming pools cause lots of accidental deaths and there is no uproar about those, because it’s not “culture wars, all war is culture war, stick it to the rednecks”. If we really want to think about the children, we should ban pools. Drownings actually are a pretty large issue. In fact, if your child goes over to a neighbors house that has both a gun and a pool, they are far more likely to die because of the pool than the gun.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2001/07/27/levittpoolsvsguns/
There are lots of articles on this but the results are pretty much the same. Your pool is 100 times more likely to kill a child than a gun. So if this is actually about saving the children, we should be going after pools, and not guns. So what about those kids right to life?
The answer is really that pools can’t be wielded as a weapon in the culture war and thus nobody gives a rats ass about them.
Frankly, accidental gun deaths don’t rate as a public safety concern compared to other accidental deaths. So if it’s about saving kids, guns aren’t the first place to start. And since I feel people should be allowed to end their own life I wouldn’t start there either.
The reason to try and prevent suicide is that when one fails, there is a very less likely 2nd attempt and guns are very effective at making the first attempt successful.
Point taken about the sources of accidental deaths, and fair point about suicide, though I think it’s worth trying to intervene to talk most people with suicidal thoughts out of it, at least at first. Sometimes the circumstances tempting someone in that direction are temporary or manageable, etc.
But the next time a madman walks into a school and kills two dozen children with his pool, let me know. Pools can’t be wielded as a weapon, period, in the same way. That’s a critical distinction as well. And obviously this is subject to opinion, but responsible use of a swimming pool has more value to a child (learning to swim, entertainment value, etc.) than a gun does. I don’t think even the hardest-core gun rights folks want their kids handling and shooting guns at the age most parents start teaching their children to swim.
Saying guns aren’t the place to start with respect to making the world safer for our kids is a cop-out, even if true. That there are other things we can and should do doesn’t mean there’s anything to stop us from doing what we can to limit gun violence.
It’s not as simple as “people choose to die, so preventing that is forcing them to live.” Sometimes people can make that choice rationally, but a lot of the time suicide is an impulse decision brought on by despair and a failure to consider all the consequences. It’s the reason why simply inconveniencing a person who wants to commit suicide often aborts the suicide attempt altogether. And lots of people who survive suicide attempts later say they are glad it didn’t succeed.
And just because there is something more dangerous out there than guns doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to prevent guns from killing people. If it makes a difference, then it’s a worthy cause.