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Opening Arguments

Mr. Obvious

Fareed Zakaria, writing in Time magazine, says the case for gun control is so obvious that only willful blindness can ignore it:

Confronted with this blindingly obvious causal connection, otherwise intelligent people close their eyes. Denouncing any effort to control guns, George Will explained on ABC News that he had "a tragic view of life, which is that ... however meticulously you draft whatever statute you wind up passing, the world is going to remain a broken place, and things like this are going to happen." I don't recall Will responding to, say, the 9/11 attacks--or any other law-and-order issue for that matter--with a "things happen" sentiment.

The other argument against any serious gun control is that it's unconstitutional, an attempt to undo American history. In fact, something close to the opposite is true.

[. . .]

So when people throw up their hands and say we can't do anything about guns, tell them they're being un-American--and unintelligent.

The National Review begs to differ:

Fareed Zakaria has tried to make “The Case for Gun Control” in Time. The results are not pretty. Virtually every argument he makes misrepresents the underlying data.

[. . .]

Zakaria shows nothing but condescension toward those who doubt the “case for gun control”: “Confronted with this blindingly obvious causal connection, otherwise intelligent people close their eyes.” But there is nothing obvious about it, and it is Zakaria who needs to open his mind to information that doesn’t support his conclusions.

One person's "blindingly obvious" is another person's closed mind.

Comments

RebeccaMallory
Fri, 08/10/2012 - 10:15am

My family lived in Israel for 3 years and I remember being served lemonade by a waitress who had a full auto 9 mm Uzi around her shoulder.  A group of female soldiers then entered, and placed their weapons on a chair and enjoyed their evening meal.

We then moved to Switzerland where it was common to see young men on public transportation bringing their militia-issued weapons back to their homes. Nobody even looked up.

I do not have the answer to American gun violence, but I will suggest that the genesis of the problem  is not the guns; it is the people.

 

Harl Delos
Mon, 08/13/2012 - 2:29am

Yjr ptoblem with gun violence isn't the gun; it's the violence,  It's pretty common that when X is shot by a gun, the person with the gun hit his target.  That isn't necessarily ytue when the weapon is poison, a bomb, or other weapon, Try to kill me by srtting fire to my house while I sleep upstairs and my neighbors could easily die while I escape.

If you want to eliminate explosives, you need to realize that a spoonful of flouor, put in a grocery sack and shaken, then tossed down an tncinerator chute can destroy an apartment building,

The guy in Airora started his attack with a gasoline bomb, and the booby traps in his apartment weren;t targeted at anyone in particular,

At least when one drug dealer shoots another, or a woman shoots her husband for sleeping around, the jiller doesn't go back later to fiish the job,  And almost anythink can be a weapon,  In Philadelphia, people would go to the back of a convenience store get themselves a cup of coffee, throw it in the cashier's eyes, and reach over to grab a handful of cash from the register drawer,

Turkey Hill fires clerks who fight back against robbers.  With lots of cameras, most of the ronners are quickly apprehended, and they don't have the expene of replacing coolers with bullet holes in them - and people aren't afraid of being sgit ub a crossfure of bullets.

What makes sense is to prohibit concealed carry entirely, and allow anybody to carry openly.  Stealth is evidence of bad intent.  And it's better to prevent crime than to live in a battle zone,

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