Gun Ownership

Gun Ownership

I'm going to assume that most of you are up to date on the fact that there is this case in Florida where a white boy shot a black boy on the notion that he was up to no good. Yes, if you know anything about the Treyvon Martin case, this conversation may be for you.

But if this sort of problem was limited only in isolated cases of a single wannabe vigilante, I wouldn't consider that alone to be enough to suggest what I am about to bring up, in that we should probably curtail our liberal gun laws. In fact, that wasn't an isolated case. If you go to just about any gun forum,you will see post after post from people who are fetishing the whole notion of "getting" to defend oneself. Hell, this whole concept of a zombie apocalypse situation is all about that. They have these fantasy of getting the chance to murder someone legally and I would go as far as to say that the people in their fantasy are often a person of color.

So it makes you wonder and put into question the liberal gun laws that do not limit guns to these so called responsible gun owners such as the man that killed Treyvon Martin, or this racist maniac, the post katrina racist death squads in new Orleans or any number of other persons who kills a "burglar." These guns are having serious consequences for people south of the border. You know, those who get in the crossfire of the Mexican drug cartels and the federallies in their daily gun battles. Oddly enough, private ownership of guns is completely illegal there, and yet that still is happening. The sheer number of the number that we allow up here eventually turn up in Mexico via smuggling, via gun show loopholes, or theft by gangs. Moreover far too often kids and people with severe depression get a hold of them and end their lives.

It's the conundrum of the whole tool. The sole purpose of a gun is to end a life. Gun nerds and hunters might not kill anybody, but the death that is caused by legally manufactured guns is not worth tolerating so that these guys can have a hobby or pretend to stock pile for a zombie outbreak. The rest of the developed world, in addition to having universal access to free health care considers our fixation on guns to be crazy.

So the question I bring to you is if we should even bother allowing private gun ownership. Then again, that could be a trick question. I would ask if we should even allow private ownership of anything. I mean, I am, after all, a socialist.

The only things I could think of to go against the logic behind all this is that rifles and shotguns have a lot of legit uses in life, a lot of people hunt to eat, especially in northern Canada. And if you were to ban guns, the only people you'd actually really hurt would be first nations hunters who do it as a way of life or a hobby. Criminals, without a doubt, will always find a way to get their hands on them.

Especially since firearms are easily producible via machine tools. I could probably build a working firearm from off-the-shelf piping and steel components with only a few hand-tools, much finer and faster work can be done with metal shapers or mills or even CNC machines. So smuggling sufficient quantities into their territories and you got yourself some crazy weapons.

So it's clear that you don't restrict gun ownership because they're hard to make, you do it because widespread availability has a massively detrimental effect on society. The "ah but people will still get a hold of guns" argument is nothing but a cop out on it all. America is too far gone at this point to even think of banning anything. Not sure how much you can do about that and restricting the ability of 14 year olds to buy machine guns at arms fairs would simply be the only start you could possibly have.

I do get a kick out of reading how those crazy conservatives write on blogs and twitter about how they honestly think their shitty gun would help them beat the US military if ever the need to rise up and against them happened. Guess what, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell. One person was even talking about how they are sure they could shoot down a drone before it got to them. HA!

Don't get me wrong. I actually LIKE guns. Hell, I often find myself in gun stores all the time. But I don't hide the fact that gun stores as a whole are god awful. There's some I've been to that don't even try to hide the fact that they're bastions of white nationalism. The only two available targets at one I was in were Osama Bin Laden and the one labeled "thug." Which was just a black guy in a hoodie. Yeah, that was pretty fucked up.

What they need to do is make a print out of a target that is a cop or a guy in a suit. Just imagine how quickly that would make it onto the news that night.

I guess my main problem is that regardless of what I think is right, it's about as easy to outlaw private ownership of firearms as it is to outlaw racism and probably just as effective.