Alphecca

Flower Child Says, "Ban Guns"

From the Berkeley Daily Planet:

There’s a new counter-trend among some leftists which says that gun control is not a winning issue these days, so it should be downplayed. Winning back red-staters, some say, means not challenging their right, indeed their need, to strap those rifles onto their pickups (forgetting the children in rural areas who have turned these guns on each other).

Women who fear being victims imagine that possession of firearms will make them safe. And urbanites whose lives are controlled by their fears believe that guns in their homes will protect them, oblivious of the statistics that say that guns in homes are most often used against family and friends, not strangers.

There are tactical discussions about tradeoffs in the political area—let’s ban Saturday night specials, not shotguns, gun shows, not gun dealers. But the central inescapable fact about guns, all guns, is that they make it possible, indeed easy, for humans to kill other humans on a whim, without reflection, with no chance to say no to anger. Death can be dealt from a distance, so that the person pulling the trigger does not even have to touch the victim. Guns provide an all-to-easy way for humans to dodge the checks and balances inserted by evolution and culture between our murderous tendencies and our actions.

The writer, Becky O'Malley, "has the need" to "believe" and "imagine" that if we just ban all guns, the criminals will gladly turn theirs in too and resume the peaceful lives they used to have.

[Cue up Barney the Dinosaur]

"I love you,
You love me,
We're as happy
As can be..."