Gun control: a failure to understand reality

Michael Bloomberg is at it again, offering simplistic sound-bite "solutions" to youth violence that cannot and will not work - because he utterly fails to identify the real problems.

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group's hands and keep them alive, he said.

"These kids think they're going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed," Bloomberg said. "They just don't have any long-term focus or anything. It's a joke to have a gun. It's a joke to pull a trigger."

At one point, the former mayor brought up New York City's stop-and-frisk practices, which gained national attention in 2011. Bloomberg said that during his last year in office, a minister at a Baptist church in Harlem invited him to speak.

"While I'm sitting there waiting for him to introduce me, he said to his congregation, 'You know, if every one of you stopped and frisked your kid before they went out at night, the mayor wouldn't have to do it,'" Bloomberg said. "And so I knew I was going to be okay with that audience."

There's more at the link.

In the first place, the problem with young men, particularly in inner-city and/or "underprivileged" environments, is not guns, but an almost complete lack of family structure, inculcated morality and ethics, and the example of worthy men and women to follow.  When the traditional family is destroyed, all the benefits of the traditional family structure are destroyed too.  Despite naysayers, studies have proven over and over and over again that children from stable homes, with a mother and father, with steady employment, and with values that are taught to children from the age they can first understand them, will grow up into stable adults, who will produce more stable children in their turn.  Successful parents and families produce successful kids, by and large, and vice versa.

That reality is illustrated by the minister's comment above.  "You know, if every one of you stopped and frisked your kid before they went out at night, the mayor wouldn't have to do it."  Guess what?  In the first part at least, he's right.  If parents did their job, and monitored their kids, and demanded that they live up to the standards they'd taught them, we'd have far fewer problems with urban violence.  However, the fact that some parents don't do their jobs is no reason to penalize the rest of us, and infringe on our rights, in order to deal with the "problem children" that result.  Just because Wesley is a gang-banger doesn't mean that I'm going to tolerate being treated like a potential Wesley, and submit to an unconstitutional stop-and-search.  I have rights, and I will exercise them, and if you try to get in my face about that, we're going to have a discussion - if necessary in a court of law, where I'll sue the living daylights out of you for ignoring or trying to abrogate my rights.

Children who lack the advantages of which we've spoken will frequently grow up into "problem" adolescents and adults.  Firearms, to them, are just another way of exerting power over others - power they have never been taught to use wisely, and have been denied in more traditional walks of life.  The gun, to them, is a way to solve problems, because they've never been given the mindset, tools and experience to solve them in a better way.

Nor is the gun unique as a tool.  Knives, clubs, vehicles, fists, feet, teeth . . . any or all of them will do if necessary.  Take away the gun, and there are plenty of alternatives.  Britain has almost eliminated legal access to handguns;  so illegal handguns have become a scourge, and criminals who can't afford them have turned to knives.  When the country tried to demonize knives and restrict access to them, criminals turned to acid attacks.  (As The Sun pointed out, "The increase is being fuelled by gangs switching from using knives and guns to try to avoid tougher sentences if caught.")  Now that attempts are being made to restrict access to acid, something new will emerge - perhaps half a brick, expertly wielded?  I'm here to tell you, a brick can kill you.  I've seen it done.  I've watched it happen.

Controlling guns doesn't work, anyway.  Those who want them will always find a way to get them.  For a start, they're too easy to make.  Consider this unwieldy, amateurish, but undoubtedly deadly six-round revolver shotgun confiscated from a criminal in Brazil two months ago.  Follow that link for more information (and, while you're there, browse through other entries to see just how inventive junkyard mechanics can be).

Stolen guns, home-made guns, and alternatives to guns, are too readily available to solve the violence problem by controlling firearms.  The instrument is not the problem - it's the person wielding the instrument.  Take away a violent person's gun, and he'll find something else to use.  That's the fatal flaw in almost every gun control "solution".  Those propounding those solutions ignore the reality that the problem is the person, not the thing.  They're trying to solve the wrong problem - and that's why gun control never works to reduce violence overall.  Just ask the British.

Peter