What we have here is failure to communicate

At this moment, because of the terrorist attack in San Bernadino (which is what it seems to have been), my Facebook feed is filled with memes about guns.  The ones from the left generally want tighter gun laws including background checks etc.  And the ones from the right say things like “Guns don’t kill people, people do” or “If you make guns illegal then only criminals will have guns.”  First off, you can see that they are talking past each other again.  At least on the left side though there is some logic.  On the right they just ignore what the left is saying and then characterize it as trying to ban guns.  The left doesn’t have pithy mantras like the right of course- which doesn’t help their cause much.  That’s their problem.  I think (though I’m not entirely sure based on the rhetoric from the right) that both sides would agree it would be nice to do something to reduce the number and frequency of mass killings in this country.  And I say I’m not entirely sure of the position on the right because I’ve actually had a discussion with a right winger in which we were discussing an incident where a family was looking for a house, went to an open house, and their two toddlers followed a cat that lived in the house up to the master bedroom.  The can went under the bed and so did the kids, where they found a loaded gun to play with and one of them shot and killed the other.  He characterized it as a tragic accident akin to a kid following a ball out into the street and getting hit by a car.  Really?  I suppose that locking up your gun before you let a bunch of people with young kids into your house unsupervised is just too much to ask.  I agree it’s tragic, but I also think the gun owner needs to be held responsible.  I mean it’s really not that hard, and what good was the gun doing for the owner under the bed anyway, when they weren’t even home?  So anyway, I suppose there are some that think the mass shootings and terrorist attacks are just an unfortunate fact of nature.  After all, other countries have mass shootings.  But the US has more of them than any other developed country in the world.  In fact we have more per year than the rest of the G20 combined.  See, we are the best at something.  Again I actually saw a right winger reply to that by saying there are tons of mass killings in Africa every year.  True, but half of Africa is essentially lawless and controlled by pirates and warlords.  That’s your idea of civilization?  That’s what you think we should compare ourselves to?  Now, you are waiting for me to jump on the gun law bandwagon  which I have been riding for a while anyway, but that is not what I am proposing.

First, let’s take care of the memes.  More restrictive gun laws make sense to me personally.  Right now a mentally unstable illegal immigrant from Iraq, who is on both the no-fly and terrorist watch lists could walk into a gun show in many states and buy an assault rifle with cash and no ID.  That, in my humble opinion, is dangerously silly.  But if you think differently that’s fine- though I think you are an idiot.  It’s a fact that countries with more restrictive gun laws have fewer mass shootings.  That correlation is very clear.  What about Mexico?  Again, really?  The correlation still holds even in the face of an outlier and even if you leave Mexico in, and take the US out.  But if you make guns illegal then only criminals will have guns.  Umm, no, the police and military would still have guns too, and nobody that I’ve seen in a position to do anything about it has actually proposed banning guns.  Not the president.  Not any democrat Senator or member of the the house, and no governor.  And let’s be clear that better background checks would not have stopped what happened at Sandy Hook or in San Bernadino either.  But there are many incidents that could have potentially been stopped, like the one at the planned parenthood clinic in Colorado.  It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.  True, but the police are generally the good guys with guns that show up.  The number of crimes stopped by private citizens with guns every year is dwarfed by the number of people killed every year accidentaly by guns- and the number of gun related homicides is orders of magnitude higher.  Guns don’t kill people, people do.  Nope, it’s generally the bullets that kill the people in gun related deaths, and it’s very hard for a person to accelerate a bullet to lethal velocity without a firearm.  70-80 children are killed every year accidentally by other children with guns.  And  more people are killed in the US by toddlers with guns every year than sharks, bears, and mountain lions combined.  The difference is that sharks and bears are a part of nature and guns are not.  Honestly I think it should be easier to vote than to buy a gun, and I know many on the right disagree with that.  Look, we require a license and insurance to drive a car, and cars can be used to kill just like a gun.  Having sensible rules about them hasn’t stopped the proliferation of cars in the US.  In fact we have a similar number of cars to the number of guns and cars are on average much more expensive than guns with more difficult licensing.

Now obviously I do not agree with the counterintuitive argument that the right makes asserting that the solution to gun violence is more guns.  Any formal root cause analysis would identify the gun as one of the root causes of gun violence.  If you take away the guns, there would be no gun violence.  There was no gun violence in the 12th century because there were no guns.  However, its very clear that no gun restrictions are going to get through this congress.  In fact, the democrats introduced a bill in the Senate just this week to ban sales of guns to anyone on the terrorist watch list from buying a gun and it was quickly voted down by the party of no.  But my  question about the whole thing is what ARE the Republican majority willing to do?   If, as they claim, the solution is more guns shouldn’t they be introducing legislation to put more guns on the street?  I realize it’s probably pretty difficult for them to conceive of a way to make the gun laws any more permissive (at least it is for me), but perhaps they could mandate that all able bodied people between the ages of 20 and 60 are required to concealed carry.  If that doesn’t work, then maybe federal legislation to eliminate all gun free zones.  Or how about free guns for everyone.  I have no idea what they might propose- and it’s not my job to figure it out for them.  There are several sitting Governors and Senators that are currently running to be the Republican nominee- and they don’t seem to think that the current president is a good leader at all– and that’s putting it mildly.  However for all their bloviating about how much better of a leader they all are than Obama, I have yet to see any one of them step up and propose or do anything about this.  They send prayers and well wishes to the victims via twitter or facebook, but prayers and well wishes will do nothing to slow the rate of bodies piling up from mass shootings.  At least Obama has called on Congress to enact stricter gun laws- his and my preferred solution.  What have Jeb Bush or Chris Christie called for their state’s legislatures to do about this.  And what legislation have Marco Rubio, Rand Paul or Ted Cruz introduced with the objective of slowing down the body count?  Surely they could do something- they all seem to think they know how to run the Country better than the President does, so shouldn’t they be stepping up with some solutions of their own?  So that’s my proposal.  You don’t like gun control?  Fine, what’s your solution?  Get some skin in the game and step up with something that you think can help to fix the problem.  Lead, follow or get out of the way.