From here:
The leader of the world’s 80 million-strong Anglican Communion has thrown his support behind stricter gun control in the U.S., saying the easy availability of powerful weapons drew vulnerable people toward violence.
[….]
Turning to the issue of gun control, Williams said: “People use guns but, in a sense, guns use people too. When we have the technology for violence easily to hand, our choices are skewed and we are more vulnerable to being manipulated into violent action.”
If Rowan Williams is right and “guns use people” then, if the citizens of the U.S. are completely disarmed and only the police and armed forces have guns, only the police and armed forces will be “vulnerable to being manipulated into violent action”, potentially leaving ordinary citizens at their mercy.
If Williams is right – and I’m not sure he is – that’s a good reason why U.S. citizens should not be disarmed.
The problem is that Gun Control™ targets registered owners. Your average gang-banger did not apply for a permit but is packing anyway. Adequate rules are in place but have no effect of criminals until they are caught. Long guns are not as popular as handguns and the expensive registry was a failure as it was not a really productive law enforcement tool. And all legitimate side arms are regulated to the hilt.
The unstable element will find a way to arm themselves.
Rowan has an opinion of everything except what matters to the Church.
Steve … in the US “legitimate” side arms (whatever that means) are hardly regulated – in many (most?) of the horrible shootings south of the border the weapons were legally obtained, and no laws were broken until the first person died …
Where there are fewer “legitimate” firearms, their conversion to “illigitimate” is that less likely (along with accidental death). It is virtually impossible to die from a firearm in Japan, for example.
Yes, all this would do is disarm the law-abiding public. Has the Archbishop spoken out about the powerful pull to use them kill lists or predator drones must then exert? When you take suicides and gang-bangers/drug dealers out of the equation, you have in the US about 6000 deaths a year by guns, whereas there are about 600,000 deaths a year from heart disease.
Would that his Holiness addressed himself to what makes people unstable it might be a help. Broken families, violent videos and movies, and psychotropic drug-use — against the larger cultural landscape of institutional fraud and corruption, masculinity in crisis, and a hollowed-out real economy — would seem to head up the list in this particular case.
Does anyone really think Adam Lanza would not have found a way to do serious bodily harm if his mother had not legally-owned handguns? Aren’t there better questions to ask about the situation, such as where was Adam Lanza’s father? Or, why did his mother own guns if she had such a mentally-unbalanced son?
Does anybody give a rats ass about this failure and what he says anymore?
The point is the ease with which the unstable can arm themselves. The fact that gun control won’t work to stop 100% of SandyHook type crimes is no reason to support the status quo.
We are so quick to judge the USA and accuse them of being a victim of their so called “gun culture”. After all, we Canadians with our far more extensive and superior gun control laws are so much more civilized. But consider this. If we Canadians really are so much better than our American cousins in terms of this “gun culture” than would we be justified in expecting our rates of school shootings to be less (better) than what is in the USA? A bit of quick research yielded the following…
Starting in 1975 Canada has had 11 school shootings resulting in 28 dead. As the USA is about 10 times our population and pervaded by this allegdedly dominant “gun culture” we should expect the US numbers to be considerably more than 10 times the Canadian numbers. So here are the US numbers for the same 37 years. 120 school shootings (10.91 times the Canadian number) resulting in 228 dead (8.14 times the Canadian number).
Source for Canadian numbers (table for Canada:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting
Source for US numbers (table at bottom):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States#List_of_notable_U.S._school_attacks
I am left wondering if our Canadian culture, which presumably does not have a “gun culture” aspect to it, is really any better than the US culture. I am also forced to wonder if our gun control laws are doing anything at all to protect us from gun crime?
Perhaps Mr Williams should start with the American president and ask him to remove the armed guards that protect his daughters.