A recent story about a legal win for DIY makers of murder weapons:
The psychopath in this video doesn’t care if criminals, children or the mentally ill can make homemade assault rifles as long as it comports with his vision that everybody should get a weapon by natural right. He calls it the end of gun control and we are supposed to shrug, arm everyone and hope that everybody being armed will work itself out. It won’t. Guns favor angry people who shoot first, not defenders. They escalate fights into murders. They do not defend anywhere near as much as they kill innocents and no legitimate study says otherwise.
Guns do not give the same advantage to defenders because we do not honor old dueling rules when we shoot at each other. The most essential talent of a gun, which has no shield and no way of stopping other projectiles, is to shoot an unwary person in the back from 50 yards away. Its function: treachery, not defense. That is physics. And that is the reason we’ve had gun control laws in this country since its founding.
There’s a childish insistence among gun fans that the Second Amendment framers must have foreseen a future of citizens running around with mass murder weapons and thought it was OK. That is a dumb misreading of one half of one sentence of the Constitution, devoid of the context in which it was created, yet endlessly repeated by Americans for peer approval in their backyards. It is also a purposeful misreading by those with a pecuniary interest in selling the guns.
There is no more reason to accept that we must now live with untraceable guns anymore than we have to accept the fact of meth labs. We have laws for those labs and we can certainly make laws to stop people from making their own guns at home with tooling machines.
Gun laws work because they change the way weapons move around and change hands and often, yes, laws can stop a murder at point of sale (more than 3 million sales were stopped since the Brady Bill passed in the early 90s, something beyond the understanding of your average gun fan).
The only things stopping us from further controlling weapons are mental constructs: a misunderstanding of the Constitution, a misunderstanding of our history, a misunderstanding of what freedom is and who gets to have it, and a sense of nihilism and hopelessness that gun nuts are so determined that there’s nothing we can do to stop them. Or we can give in to the fallacy that guns are part of America, always have been and that we’ll always have to live with an increased risk of sudden violent death as the price of freedom. That’s not idealism. That’s medievalism: Tolerating horror to preserve somebody else’s traditions.
Gun nuts are putting our lives at risk for things they don’t know, won’t know, don’t understand, can’t read and won’t read. They put our children’s lives at risk because their curiosity and any normal intellectual inquiry about the harm they might be causing stops if it forces them to question their own behavior and (even more ridiculous) their identities.
Gun liberty has nothing to do with preserving what America is. This is like any other place: You fix things when they are broken and you don’t use folk traditions as an excuse not to. People like this have no right to make us live in fear.
Beauty is Imperfection 