By now, many people are aware of NRA President Wayne LaPierre’s ridiculous press conference of yesterday, in which he claimed that the best way to stop bad guys with guns is to have more good guys with guns. Then he linked “badness” to “madness” and argued that since madness is basically unpreventable, we have to have people armed and ready to kill bad guys (of any kind) at the drop of a hat if we are to be “safe.”

Here are a few reasons why this is stupid.

1. Where do “crazy guys” get their guns? Well, recently most have used weapons that were attained legally, either by themselves or family. Control that access point and crazy guys can have all the murderous impulses they want, but they won’t be able to get the guns with which they enact their murders. (BTW, “bad” guys–e.g., drug dealers–get their guns by stealing them from “good” people who have them in their homes, so if we could control the home access point that violence would get better, too.)

2. Madness is fairly evenly distributed globally: there are crazy people everywhere. But mass murders occur only in those countries that have lots of guns in lots of peoples’ hands. 

3. Video games are played everywhere in the world. Teenage angst and rage exist everywhere there are teenagers. Yet somehow these things seem not to induce mass murders anywhere but the US.

4. Columbine had an armed guard. The people at Ft. Hood were trained soldiers armed with high powered weapons. They couldn’t stop mass murders with guns. Why would even a vaguely sane person believe that untrained amateurs could … especially scared amateurs shooting at a moving target in a large crowd. (BTW, when those amateurs kill the “wrong” people, as they surely will, they’re guilty of murder, you know.)

There’s more, but that’s enough. Reality has a way of being, well, real, no matter what one’s ideology commands. A heavily armed America will be an America with greater numbers of murders, mass murders, suicides and accidental murders. 

Sounds like a good idea to you, I guess. The rest of us choose to be part of the “reality-based community.”

1. esbreece said: Soldiers at active duty bases are not armed unless they are on duty of some kind, ie, an MP, going to a range, etc. The soldiers at Ft. Hood were not armed.
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   One of the best arguments I’ve ever seen for gun control

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    It’s so interesting the way this thing has totally separated once united nut job factions. For instance, the NRA and...

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