...other than the ability to hit your target.
Professor James Q Wilson (He, with George Kelling, of "Broken Windows" fame) on the futility of ever more and tighter gun control.
First, his mistake of fact, to get that out of the way:
Leading British, French, German, Italian and Spanish newspapers have blamed the United States for listening to Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Assn. Many of their claims are a little strange. At least two papers said we should ban semiautomatic assault weapons (even though the killer did not use one); another said that buying a machine gun is easier than getting a driver's license (even though no one can legally buy a machine gun); a third wrote that gun violence is becoming more common (when in fact the U.S. homicide rate has fallen dramatically over the last dozen years).
Emphasis added.
Sorry, Professor Wilson. While it is true, that without certain permissions (such as the people who supply the movie industry, etc) owning and buying machineguns is not legal in California (where Pepperdine is) the same is not true for great swaths of these United States. Oddly enough, despite their presence in the population, machineguns aren't much found (the legal ones especially) being used in a criminal fashion (just as an aside). And as for that Euro paper, they haven't tried to buy a legal machinegun anytime recently... getting a driver's license is both easier and *much* cheaper.
That said... he next brings up a point I've made numerous times. Culture counts, and must be taken into account... and oh, btw, the Euros are not as clean as they imagine themselves to be:
If we want to guess by how much the U.S. murder rate would fall if civilians had no guns, we should begin by realizing — as criminologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have shown — that the non-gun homicide rate in this country is three times higher than the non-gun homicide rate in England. For historical and cultural reasons, Americans are a more violent people than the English, even when they can't use a gun. This fact sets a floor below which the murder rate won't be reduced even if, by some constitutional or political miracle, we became gun-free.
But wait! There's more!
AS FOR THE European disdain for our criminal culture, many of those countries should not spend too much time congratulating themselves. In 2000, the rate at which people were robbed or assaulted was higher in England, Scotland, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Sweden than it was in the United States. The assault rate in England was twice that in the United States. In the decade since England banned all private possession of handguns, the BBC reported that the number of gun crimes has gone up sharply.Some of the worst examples of mass gun violence have also occurred in Europe. In recent years, 17 students and teachers were killed by a shooter in one incident at a German public school; 14 legislators were shot to death in Switzerland, and eight city council members were shot to death near Paris.
The main lesson that should emerge from the Virginia Tech killings is that we need to work harder to identify and cope with dangerously unstable personalities.
It is a problem for Europeans as well as Americans, one for which there are no easy solutions — such as passing more gun control laws.
If I say this, I'm just a shill for the NRA, I know. But if a respected college professor says it, well, it must be true, right? (That last is for the Euros, not you guys).
Read his whole thing here, in the LA Times. For a different viewpoint (gotta have balance) check out Rosa Brooks. For all that I wave off her gun control verbiage - I am with her on the issue of an excessively self-indulgent and overly maudlin response to things. Which I am also sometimes guilty of, I admit.
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