by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/span>he reaction to the murders in Blacksburg is eliciting the usual liberal nostrums. Typical is the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0editorial that concluded, \u201cWhat is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.\u201d No, what is needed is some coherent thinking that will keep us from allowing the government to restrict further our Constitutional freedoms.<\/p>\n Part of the problem with making sense of such a tragedy is that the spectacular drama and emotion of the crime, stoked by the 24\/7 media, distorts its true significance. As horrible as the Virginia Tech murders are for the victims and their families, death by campus maniac is still highly unlikely. Indeed, any gunshot death by a stranger is relatively rare. Homicide ranks fifteenth among causes of death, and only 19% of homicide victims did not know their murderer. So before we start hysterically legislating, let\u2019s recognize that the risk of any college student getting murdered by a stranger is extremely low.<\/p>\n The same caution should guide us in resisting the gun-control hysteria we\u2019re likely to witness in the next few months. In 2004, 8,299 people were killed by guns. Don\u2019t forget, only 19% of them were strangers\u2013\u2013that\u2019s 1576 people. To put these numbers in perspective, in 2004 16,694 people were killed by drunk drivers, the greatest percentage of whom were males between 21 and 24. If we\u2019re worried about the safety of college students, then, we should be focusing on drinking. I\u2019m willing to bet the number of college students killed by alcohol poisoning at parties and fraternity rushes is far greater than all the victims of school shootings put together.<\/p>\n More important are the flawed assumptions behind the gun-control hysteria. Partly it reflects the unfamiliarity with guns of most people these days, the consequence of life in cities and suburbs and the decline of hunting. Thus we have seen the appearance of the \u201canti-gun nut,\u201d the mirror image of the \u201cgun-nut.\u201d Like the latter, the \u201canti-gun nut\u201d fetishizes the gun, making it an almost diabolically magic instrument that takes control of the owner\u2019s mind and insidiously drives him to violence. This superstition is abetted by two-bit Freudian ideas that make the gun some sort of compensation for sexual repression or inadequacy.<\/p>\n But as anybody familiar with guns knows, the gun is a tool, its use or misuse reflective of the person who wields it. Just as thousands of people misuse alcohol and their cars to kill others, some people \u2014 half as many as drunk-drivers, remember \u2014 misuse their guns to kill. And just as millions of people drive responsibly and don\u2019t kill others, millions of gun-owners use their weapons responsibly. The difference is, a gun can save your life. We have no real notion of how many people escape harm or death just by showing a weapon. In the rough rural Fresno County neighborhood I grew up in, I know of at least two occasions when my father avoided injury from thugs by poking his .38 in their faces and concentrating their minds wonderfully. The research of John Lott on crime rates in states with liberal, concealed-weapons permits suggests that, as his book is titled, \u201cmore guns, less crime.\u201d In short, the demonizing of guns as instruments of wanton murder is a superstition reflecting liberal prejudices.<\/p>\n The worst of these prejudices, however, is the liberal bias against trusting individuals to make decisions about how to manage their own lives. Restrictive gun control laws assume that people are too untrustworthy or incapable or stupid to keep and carry a weapon. Thus laws are written by elite snobs who think they know how to run your life better than you do. Of course, this presumption of the average person\u2019s incompetence is very selective. The same people who think a sane, law-abiding citizen can\u2019t be trusted with carrying a gun will assume that a 15-year-old girl should be allowed to abort her baby. Think about it: the mature person can\u2019t carry a gun because he\u00a0might<\/i>\u00a0kill someone, but the teenaged girl can have an abortion that definitely\u00a0will<\/i>\u00a0kill someone.<\/p>\n Ultimately, though, the biggest flaw behind the \u201cmore gun control\u201d solution is the assumption that such restrictions could keep someone from getting a gun if he really wanted one. We\u2019ve spent billions on restricting drugs, including making them illegal and imposing draconian penalties, but any kid in America today can get any drug he wants in an hour. I see no reason why guns would be any different. Washington D.C. has some of the most restrictive controls on guns, yet suffers one of the highest murder rates in the country.<\/p>\n We should not let these murders perpetrated by a psychopath cloud our judgment. The recent circuit court ruling that D.C.\u2019s restrictive\u00a0 gun law is unconstitutional opens up the chance that decades of laws violating the Second Amendment will be overturned by the Supreme Court. Don\u2019t let emotional hysteria get in the way of this long overdue restoration of one of our rights, and the affirmation of our republic\u2019s foundational assumption: that people are competent enough to run their own lives.<\/p>\n \u00a92007 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Madness and massacre will not result in sound gun laws. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The reaction to the murders in Blacksburg is eliciting the usual liberal nostrums.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,759],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1qy","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":5490,"position":0},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. 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Thornton FrontPage Magazine Ten years ago this week,\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan, after he had been lured into what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani about the links between al Qaeda and the \u201cshoe bomber\u201d Richard\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5339,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/troys-literary-offenses\/","url_meta":{"origin":5490,"position":3},"title":"Troy’s Literary Offenses","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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