Guns Kill People

Every time there is a shooting rampage in which unarmed, innocent civilians are killed, some lunatic conservative commentator offers the opinion that the entire tragedy could have been averted if everyone at the scene had been armed.  I first noticed this trend after the Virginia tech massacre, and it continued through the Arizona shootings in January 2011.  Most recently the theory has been resurrected in the aftermath of the last Friday’s Oslo shootings.  As ridiculous as this argument appears to the vast majority of the world’s sane population, it’s useful to go through the exercise of enumerating a few of the many reasons why we wouldn’t be safer if everybody walked around with guns.

1)     The Plaxico Factor

For those of you unfamiliar with Plaxico’s story, he was a star wide receiver for the New York Giants until he was caught bringing an unlicensed firearm into a New York City nightclub.  The reason he was caught is because he accidentally shot himself in the thigh while scaling the stairs to enter the club.  Not only did he get sentenced – unfairly in my opinion – to two years in prison, but he spent that night in the hospital while doctors tended to his injuries.

2)      The Professional Factor

The numerous shootings of unarmed citizens by police officers in the past few months demonstrate that cops are fallible.  Sometimes they make fatal errors, and other times they can just be cold blooded killers.  But being trained professionals, cops are still much more effective than your average Joe with a gun license.  The average gun-owner doesn’t have the training or steadiness required to diffuse the incredibly tense and chaotic situations that arise from Jared Loughner-style massacres.  In fact, Joe Zamudio, one of the civilians who helped subdue Jared Loughner after his shooting rampage, admits that he came dangerously close to shooting the wrong man.  Zamudio ran to scene of the incident from a nearby drugstore after hearing gunshots.  As he ran, he readied his gun in anticipation of taking out the shooter.  He then claims that he caught sight of a man holding a gun and was about to shoot him before realizing that the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter, but was actually another bystander who had wrestled the gun away from Loughner.  As it turns out, the real hero had been unarmed, and he almost got shot for his efforts.

3)      Murderers buy guns too

In many of the high profile shooting cases, the killer turns out to have obtained his guns legally.  This is true in all the cases mentioned thus far.  The Virginia Tech shooter, Jared Loughner and the Norway shooter all purchased their guns through legal means.  There is some dispute as to whether the two American shooters lied about their mental illnesses or drug use on their applications, but the fact that all they had to do was check the right box and walk out of the gun store with semi-automatic weapons is a testament to the idea that guns should be harder to obtain, not easier.

4)      The Statistical Factor

Though I’m not a huge fan of clichés, certain clichés are clichés because they succinctly convey genuine truth and wisdom.  With that said, numbers don’t lie. Among developed countries, gun ownership is directly correlated to murder rates and suicide rates.

5)     The Proliferation Factor

As a staunch rationalist, I feel no empirical argument is complete without a sound complimentary deductive argument to explain it.  When you think about it, it just makes sense that fewer guns would mean fewer deaths from gun violence.  The principal is analogous to that of nuclear non-proliferation.  As more nations join the nuclear club, there is an increased chance that one of those nations will at some point be taken over by a murderous madman with designs for world-domination.  Additionally, the presence of all these weapons fosters a constant state of tension in which the threat of brutal violence is always lurking beneath the surface and keeping people on edge.

If I had been on the island of Utoya last Friday when Anders Breivik started shooting, I probably would have wished I had a gun on me.  But my first choice (by a wide margin) would have been for Breivik to have been prevented from getting a gun in the first place.