Virginia Tech and Guns: My Shameless Opinion

Hello!

The events earlier this week at Virginia Tech have reopened a lot of people's awareness of the gun control issue.

So, I thought this was an opportunity for me to shamelessly pomote my own opinion on guns.

My opinions:

A) They are too available in our country.
B) Owning a hand gun should not be every citizen's right.
C) Arming Virginia Tech campus would ultimately result in more -- not fewer -- shooting deaths.
D) Guns can do a lot more damage in a short period of time than, say, a baseball bat, a tennis racket, a car, or just about anything else gun rights advocates insist any killer could use.
E) No one needs to own multiple guns.

There are those of us who say that the availability of guns in this country has reached more than laughable limits. The fact that a person with the kind of mental problems the shooter had could get a handgun is terrible. It is also terrible that the kind of gun the Maryland sniper used is available on the internet . . .or that a fellow I know managed to buy two assault rifles at the age of sixteen just by going to a gun show and offering a collector some money. (When I asked if he had ever killed anyone, his response was, "almost")

To me, the arguments for the wide availability of guns in this country are so illogical they're laughable. There's no way regular, intelligent people actually believe that if they owned a handgun -- or even an assault rifle -- they would be able to defend themselves against the American Government should it turn against them. I find it hard to accept that some Americans believe that the many lives lost each year from gun violence are a worthy sacrifice for the virtue of keeping laws that allow just about anyone with enough cash to walk into a pawn shop and purchase a gun or order one on-line.

I once substitute taught with a lady who boasted about the fact that her husband had gotten the sniper job at the prison because he owned "fifty plus guns." I didn't say anything but I did wonder why anyone would consider owning "fifty plus guns" a positive thing. To me, it's a stupid thing. I wanted to ask, "So you're husband is that insecure?" but I didn't. It wouldn't have done any good.

I'm not against hunting. If you want to own a hunting rifle, and your background is totally clean, and you know how to use the gun you're buying, and you store it safely, and you only own one for yourself and, perhaps, one for a family member, and you follow all gun laws, then that's fine with me. But I am against citizens owning hand guns. They're too easy to hide, and they are too easily used for crime. It's not worth it.

And I've had it with people who claim that guns aren't responsible for deaths -- that people are responsible. Yes, the people using the guns are responsible. However, a gun -- unlike a car or a tennis racket -- is a weapon designed to kill and to make it easy to kill. To say that a murderer will kill regardless of whether he/she has a gun is not a practical argument. That would be like saying that Cho Seung-Hui would have murdered 32 people regardless of whether he had a gun. If he had a lot of time and the people he intended to murder were very slow, this could be a possibility. It is also true that he would have been hard pressed to hide a bow-and-arrow on his way into the Norris Hall (how likely would it have been that he would have had the skill to use it anyway). It is also true that he would not have been equally likely to hit 32 people with his car before any of them ran away. Or that that he could have gotten those people to sit still while he beat each of them to death with a baseball bat one by one. My point is that guns make it too easy to kill for them to be equated with any object that has the potential kill someone. People are responsible for the people they shoot, yes, but guns are responsible for making it easy for them to do so.

The only solution I see is to restrict -- perhaps severely -- everyman's access to guns.

Some people say the correct solution to the Virginia Tech Murders would have been for other students to have the right to carry handguns.

My reaction to this argument?

Great! More shooting! Hooray! Let's all feel threatened and have a little shooting party!

If the campus was armed, more people would die, not fewer. Give someone with a gun a bad temper and see what happens. It's not worth it.

And that's my opinion.