It’s a syllogism after all, a logical progression whose premise is demonstrably false. As a claim based on falsehood its logic, though at first glance lucid and clear, is flawed, its message corrupted and hence untrustworthy. Claims based on lies seem to flow quite logically, adopt the look of truth but in the end prove false, pose sensible but manifest absurd.
>>>>>>Since a premise often goes unquestioned, it’s a step in logic frequently accepted as true. In this way the element of inference in sophistry can act quite deceptively subtle and insidious while sophistry itself can be very misleading. It’s the jam that puts the sham in scam, you might say.
>>>>>>There’s more to gun violence than ever meets the eye of course, far more than springs from a well turned phrase. Those bucking gun control must concede that more people kill with guns than any other weapon of choice. They must admit that gun violence isn’t just out of hand but rampant in the United States today. Of those who kill, the greatest number kill with guns, weapons sold legitimately by mainstream gunsmiths and dealers with the endorsement and advocacy of the NRA.
If guns don’t kill people, people kill people, then it’s all of a piece that killers do the crime using guns, often rapid-fire arms too efficient and available to ever even broach the public safety. Through strong, relentless, wealth-fueled endorsement and advocacy, a slick NRA only ducks the point of gun violence, flouts the hand of gun makers, dealers and itself in the creation of gun violence all across the country. Its myth of some Second Amendment right to personal ownership of mass-killing devices only serves to heighten gun violence.
Its preeminent lobby and disproportionate influence over Congress sets the personal right to ownership of automatic rifles over the right of US citizens to life, freedom and happiness. Tipping American politics to its own advantage the NRA accepts, allows, defends, even boosts the pervasive incidence of gun violence.
Despite the component of free will in gun violence, the argument always harks back to dubious guns themselves, back to their very wide assortment, sophistication, fine utility, power to kill and of course, the key to all gratuitous forms of gun violence, the ripe availability of guns in every cast.
Okay, Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So why chance gunning up people prone to kill with guns, especially guns expressly built for war conditions? If gun safety is so indispensable, why shrink the matrix of that safety to a crap shoot?
What need have common folk for combat munitions? They’re untoward protection. They’re inappropriate hunting tools. For that matter, the right to personal ownership of multi-fire rifles has as much to do with second amendment rights as the right to personal ownership of thermonuclear weapons.
Does the second amendment grant people the right to own fighter planes, army tanks, land mines or rocket launchers? Are assault rifles any less outrageous than WMD in the hands of ordinary civilians? Are there standing minimum-kill rates germane to any weapons of mass destruction ranking some benign and others hazardous? Don’t all rank extreme and quite superfluous in the average citizen’s arsenal?
Sure, the AR-15 looks cool and it’s certainly fun to shoot but the need to own it feeds onle one of two selfish motives, the first infatuation and the second animosity. You might call each respectively elfin fetish and rancorous whim or better yet and more to the point, love of play and the urge to kill. There’s nothing in between and, after all, average Americans needn’t swallow either lure to get by.
So, by what quirk do pyrotechnic fetishes and vitriolic kinks take precedence over school children’s safety, over their neurological health, over academic calm, over normalcy and general well-being, over guarantee of life, freedom and happiness under the US Constitution?
Add to the fact that guns do help people kill people the fact that during a heinous shooting in 1996 at Port Arthur, Tasmania, a man wielding more than one semi-auto firearm quickly slaughtered 35 people and wounded 23. Australia, bastion of individual rights and fiercely pro gun-ownership, did however succeed in in the quest to ban all semi-automatic weapons. It further launched a rare and genial gun buy-back program that was funded by the Australian government’s own Medicare system. More, the country hasn’t seen one mass shooting since.
Prime Minister John Howard rallied all 6 Australian states behind new, unique and very stringent gun control, working the awesome feat in as few as 12 days. Eventually his government managed to buy back and trash more than a million means of bold, excessive firepower, a million plus broad-fire and rapid-fire guns.
That’s not to say that Howard’s tack and Australia’s utter compliance pose a perfect model for US gun control but both did work admirably for the parties involved and America stands to take a valuable lesson from the highly effective John Howard method.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. In the end the lame catch phrase is woefully incomplete and the old saw should read thus: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people–in bulk and with rapid-fire guns too easy to get. It only takes the fatal blend of rage and guns to cause a mass killing today and the blight has not assuaged in the least for the simple reason that talk alone assuages nothing, argument nothing, stubbornness nothing, politics, greed and selfishness utterly nothing.
Does Congress fail to see the pressing urgency of stopping relentless murder in staggering proportions? Has it grown so wholly inured to constant blood-shed? Has it finally grown so shamefully indifferent to the decimating butchery taking place all around us, so cavalier, so all-fired insensitive to the cold, inane, merciless killing of even little school children?
Have legislators grown at length so deathly afraid of riling up contributors that they’re now loath to take the very simplest, most effective, most common sense, indeed the most popular legal measures to at least reduce the skyrocketing incidence of gun violence all across the nation?
Have they ruled the issue of large-scale gun violence once and for all a hopeless case, insoluble, negligible or is it that rife and toxic partisanship has seized up legislative chambers to an untenable state of permanent gridlock?
People are dying. Let me repeat: people are dying. Let me repeat: Even Children are dying regularly in senseless mass shootings across the country and nothing of consequence is being done to stop it. Hello, Congress! Hello! Hello! Is anybody out there?
To date, even the mixed efforts of law enforcement and criminal justice seem to assuage little or nothing at all in the way of mass killing. No, only action, immediate action, positive action, powerful legislative action set squarely against outrageous killing power in the hands of who-knows-what new offender pledges to curb the seemingly endless trail of bloody carnage thrust upon us too often over the years, the continual, needless, stoppable killing of the innocent and defenseless, that huge, tragic, ever-growing complement of victims who all too often includes our little ones. The powers that be know this and still nothing improves.
How can the general population itself act effectively in the fight against nationwide gun violence. We’re not fighting familiar opposition in our ranks but rather powerful opposition from lobbies that shouldn’t even exist within the halls of Congress. Is our demanding Congress institute common sense gun laws effective enough popular action? Apparently not.
The tack hasn’t worked yet, though many continue trying. How do average citizens calling desperately for urgent approval of common sense gun laws move to sway a Congress more impressed by a grease-palming NRA than all the horrific facts on record that legislation needs immediate passage in order to stem an overwhelming tide of wild, wanton, wide-scale murder?
Can’t we oust the NRA from our Congress? What’s the NRA to do with popular representation anyway? They’re currently facing financial crisis as well as investigation. Maybe they’ll just tend to implode by themselves eventually. Maybe not. In the meantime, in good conscience, what’s Congress waiting for, wholesale slaughter of more defenseless fellow Americans, massacre of more sweet, vulnerable children?
Is Congress so complacent, so detached, so desensitized it thinks the murderous trend will just fizzle on its own? How often must tragedy come about before lawmakers take viable action against heinous crime? Is the downside of gun law anywhere near as abhorrent as the ongoing annihilation of school kids?
It may be no coincidence the volatile fusion of unstable persons and their misuse of rapid-fire guns take a greater toll in human life all the time. Background checks are banefully insufficient and the prospect of punishment is small or no deterrent. It’s clear that our society can better control allotment of extreme and superfluous automatic weapons than the unforeseeable whims of the people wielding them.
It’s a sad day in America when at last it grows obvious that our own lives and the lives of all our loved ones are increasingly more dependent on the common sense gun control most Americans vehemently support and yet, practically speaking, absolutely nothing’s being done about the problem.
By Reuters account, in the exponential wake of mass shootings around the United States since 1999, at least 2000 people, some 39 in 2021 alone, have been killed or suffered some form of injury. More claimed mental or emotional impact. So where’s the end? When is enough, enough? Where are common sense, common duty and common decency? Why aren’t there more kind, conscientious lawmakers willing to act right now to avert more horror?
–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com