Nightline on Obama, gun control

[unixronin]

Nightline broadcast a good and pretty balanced segment last night, discussing Barak Obama's gun control position and the massive gun buying rush that's going on across the US now by people concerned that if they don't buy them now, they won't be able to.

Particular points to note:

• The customer who keeps repeating to the reporter, "Never mind Obama's words, look at his actions."¹
• The gunshop owner reporting Obama supporters coming into his store wearing their Obama buttons, who just voted for him but are still afraid he'll ban guns.

[1]  You might have seen me say this once or twice.  Assuming you've been paying attention.

Comments

Re: (kind of) slipery slope

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I read about that incident. But I also remember the incident when an angry woman in her 40s deliberately drove her car at speed into a line of random people waiting at a bus stop in Los Angeles. And I remember the incident in my home town in England in 1978 or so, when a man robbed a shopgirl of the pouch in which she was carrying the day's takings to the bank, several hundred yards from the store, by the crude and simple expedient of bashing her skull in with a hammer.

Honestly, the expectation of stopping crime via gun control is based on the assumption that a thug who would commit a violent crime with a gun is incapable of committing the same crime with a knife or a baseball bat. Gun control also neglects that it is not a one-sided question: There are approximately 8,000 to 10,000 actual criminal homicides with firearms in an average year in the US (and, sadly, almost 20,000 suicides); but in that same average year, various estimates place the number of times citizens use firearms to defend themselves from crimes at anywhere from 1.5 million tomes to 5 million. (That lower 1.5 million times estimate was one developed, and reluctantly conceded, by the very anti-gun Clinton justice department. Most estimates cluster around 4 to 4.5 million.) In more than 90% of those incidents, no shots are actually fired; even so, armed citizens in the US lawfully shoot and kill twice as many felons each year as the police do.


Truthfully, the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce crime in the US is to decriminalize drug use and make safe, clean, pure supplies of drugs available at clinics at manufacturing cost (with a proviso that you'd better not be caught consuming them in public). It would eliminate the profitability of the drug trade, which would eliminate the incentive to bring the stuff into the US illegally. Bam, no more drug gangs. Drug use would probably drop, because with no profit to be made, there's no incentive for pushers to hook new buyers. Massive amounts of money and police resources would be freed up to deal with other issues. Hospitals would have less overdoses to deal with, and hospitalizations from tainted drugs would all but vanish. Garage meth labs (with their associated fires, explosions and toxic cleanup issues) would become a thing of the past - if you can't make any money selling the stuff, why bother? Prison overcrowding would end, and we could go back to using prisons to keep actually dangerous criminals off the streets.

If EVERYONE did it, the drug cartels out of Medellin and Cali would collapse.

People would still use drugs, of course. But I think left to themselves, that would tend to become a self-limiting problem.

Re: (kind of) slipery slope

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

I agree with legalizing drugs, but I doubt that will ever happen in the U.S. I wonder what that would mean for the pharmaceutical companies? Would they start making meth?

Re: (kind of) slipery slope

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I guess someone would have to. But as long as there are people who are determined to use meth, crank, whatever anyway, better at least they use them without a dozen toxic contaminants.