We know if you are an unregistered gun dealer in Arizona, you can sell as many weapons – sophisticated military assault weapons included – as you can to as many people as want them – with no background check or personal information – as long as you do it at a gun trade show. That a large number of those weapons go straight to gangs, drug cartels and others on the wrong side of the law is irrelevant. Hey, a good chunk of those weapons go down Mexico way, so it really is their problem. Remember, people kill not guns! Woo hoo! Lock and load.
The weapons James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter, used were all purchased with background checks from local Colorado gun dealers, although vast rounds of ammunition he needed were secured on the Internet. Nobody knew he was seeing psychiatrist for possible schizophrenia.
We are obsessed with guns. Our constitution envisioned a civilian militia, able to keep a wary check on governments gone bad. So we created a constitutional amendment at a time, hundreds of years ago, because it was this kind of militia that toppled the oppressive Brits who occupied our shores. Hundreds of years ago. Today, the United States is one of only three countries with a constitutional right to bear arms, one that is very broadly interpreted to allow weapons that most nations relegated only to the best trained cadres in their military.
Neither presidential candidate will touch gun control, and even though we all have this gut feeling that we have probably crossed the line in allowing these weapons to flow freely through our civilian society, nobody has the courage to defy the NRA or address the issue because the urban states that suffer the most from criminals with guns – those states with the largest populations in the United States – have no more power on the Senate side of Congress that states with less than one tenth or less of the population. Nothing can get through a deadlocked House either. So the candidates couldn’t implement gun control if they wanted. They just remain silent and console the victims of the Aurora massacre.
With this sense that gun control is impossible, what is the reaction of average citizens when such awful mass shootings occur? “Background checks for people wanting to purchase firearms in Colorado spiked more than 40 percent … after a gunman opened fire in a suburban Denver movie theater, killing 12 people and wounding 58 more.
“During the three days following the July 20 shooting, gun dealers submitted 2,887 requests for state background checks, compared with 2,012 during the same period a week earlier, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
“Booming gun sales following mass shootings are not unusual. Immediately after a Glock-wielding gunman killed six people at a Tucson shopping center in January 2011, for example, one-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent, to 263, according to FBI data obtained by Bloomberg.” BusinessWeek,com, July 28th.
We have more guns in our civilian population than any other country, and lead the world in deaths per 100,000 by firearm: 60% of homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm. There were 3.0 recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm per 100,000 inhabitants; for comparison, the figure for the United Kingdom, with very restrictive firearm laws (handguns are totally prohibited, for example) was 0.07, about 40 times lower, and for Germany 0.2… [the list of developed countries rated by deaths per 100,000]
- United States - 11,127 (3.601/100,000)
- Canada – 165 (0.484/100,000)
- Germany – 381 (0.466/100,000)
- France – 255 (0.389/100,000)
- Australia – 65 (0.292/100,000)
- United Kingdom – 68 (0.109/100,000)
- Japan – 39 (0.030/100,000) Wikipedia
No matter how pro-gun you may be, shouldn’t we at least start by banning huge magazines that allow continuous sprays of bullets without reloading that have no other purpose than to allow mass killings. And what about military-grade semi-automatics? How many maniacs get to buy guns legally before we get the picture? According to the NRA… never! Why are assault weapons legal anywhere in the civilian world?! Do you feel safer because they are available? Or not?
I’m Peter Dekom, and I cannot tell you how many folks in Europe and Asia I have spoken to are getting too scared to travel to “gun-crazy” America.
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