Bang Bang Bang
Every time there is a big shooting, particularly a school shooting, there would be a lot of talks about gun control: “if everybody were armed, the crazy gunman would have been dead before too much damage is done” or “if there were no guns, this would not have happened.” The justification for this 'debate', at least the announced one, is to honour the memories of the dead. Nothing is further from the truth. In this debate, the dead are reduced to be tokens, numbers, excuses for something else; they become weapons in a ideological war. That is no honouring at all. And indeed how can we, those who have memory or knowledge of those who died, have anything about them that we can honour? What is the memory to be honoured? To use them in this kind of 'debate' is not only not honouring but degrading. It may mean something, this degradation, if it contribute to a important debate. Unfortunately, even that is asking too much. A great debate and the making of important laws and social policies should not be influenced by single incidents, regardless the horror of those incidents. Laws and policies should be about the general, the almost universal and not the specific. Murder, for example, may in some incidents be good and justified, but that is no reason to legalize murder. One crazy man guns down a few dozen people is horrifying but it should not have any impact on the debate on gun control. It is but one incident; and all would agree it is a very unusual occurrence. Gun control is not about stopping the rare crazy murderous people. It is about human value, political philosophy, law enforcement in general, the social contract, practical needs, ethics, etc. It should not be about emotion or opportunism. This 'debate' right now serve neither the memory of the deceased or the real debate on gun control.
posted by Unknown at 3:21 a.m.
3 Comments:
I don't think gun control debates have anything to do with honouring the dead victims. I agree that events like the Virginia Tech shooting, Columbine, etc are used as excuses to push heavier gun control laws. It scares people. It scares people that someone can walk into a Wal Mart in some places and buy a rifle and some ammunition and go shoot someone. However, in Canada's case at least, the majority of gun violence is committed by people who have stolen or purchased stolen, unregistered firearms. It has nothing to do with the responsible people who want to protect themselves or use firearms for sport hunting who have gone through the long, exhaustive process of getting properly registered.
"Laws and policies should be about the general, the almost universal and not the specific."
I have to disagree there. If we only made policies about general, universal things, we would be making sweeping generalizations, and nothing would enter legislation. Laws ARE specific. They must be very detailed and specific in order to be upheld in court. I don't know what you could mean by a universal law, or how it would be enforced. I don't think murder can be good or justified ever. The definition of murder is the serious and purposeful intent of one person to take the life of another human being. There is no justification of that. Ever. No human being has the right to pass that kind of judgment on another human, no matter what might have been done.
I know you posted this over a year ago, but I always feel the need to comment on thoughts about gun control debates.
PS. this is your niece from Toronto, Sarah.
Thanks Sarah. I do agree with your first paragraph. I will only point out that stolen guns were all once legitimately owned. And it is far more likely to be hurt by one's own gun then by others. My arguement though isn't about gun control per se, but rather about the framing of the debate itself.
Laws are specific only in so far as it is about specific concepts but not situations--for example murder rather than specific kinds of murder. There are certainly legitimate kind of murder, people can intentionally kill another without legal consequence when it happens on battlefields, in self defense, in the protection of another, and in some jurisdiction, out of passion, to name a few. I don't agree with these things, but as law, a social contract, a society must come to term with it in the form of law. And this coming to term is what I was talking about.
As it had happen before, may it be Columbine or U of Montreal, nothing comes to the 'debate' after passion passed. Gun control south of the border is non-existent, and here it is more tedious than useful. These are result of actions by government to calm the passions resulting from the horrors of the killings, not to deal with the heart of the problem. Here is my point, I want gun control, I want effective and restrictive gun gontrol, debates and laws that are made 'in passion' are in general neither clear, specific or effective. We should, for example, revisit the whole issue not when there is no blood in our eyes.
my last sentence should have read: "We should, for example, revisit the whole issue now when there is no blood in our eyes."
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