I haven’t had time to engage in 2 threads at the same time lately, but I’d like to get back to this one. Especially in light of the attacks in Paris.
I’m sure all the victims in Paris would have been thankful for at least 1 person who could have returned fire even if all their training consisted of learning how the gun worked at the gun shop counter when they bought the gun, and even if the person had Aspergers.
That being said, it’s a good idea to go back to an overall look at what CM is proposing. He’s proposing licensing that includes training and a psych eval if anyone wants to carry a gun outside of their own home to somewhere other people might be. In his view, this is not disallowing someone to defend themselves because they can pass the training and psych eval to carry in public, and they have no restrictions if they don’t carry in public.
This is a bad idea on many levels. The devil is in the details. The details being exactly how much training and what kind of psych eval would insure that no-one would mishandle their gun in public.
The only way to determine how much training and what the psych eval should evaluate is by how bad it is relative to not licensing. The good news is that we have a lot of data on people being able to get guns without these requirements. And what we see from the data is that there simply isn’t a problem with people mishandling their gun because they lacked the training or because they didn’t have the right psychological make-up. Sure there are instances of people that thought they knew what they were doing with a gun and ended up making things worse, but these instances are far outweighed by people protecting themselves because they could easily obtain a gun without more training than what they were comfortable with, and without the state deciding if they had the correct psychological make-up.
But one may counter that training is good and keeping the guns out of the hands of people that cannot handle a gun psychologically is good. And we’d all agree in theory. But there are a few problems that negates this argument. An obvious problem is that if some training is good, then more training is better and if some psychological stability is good, then more stability is better based on the same argument. And this will always be true since there will always be shootings, and as long as there are shootings, there will always be a proposal for more training and more rigorous psych eval. It will never end. This is especially troublesome for the psychological argument since, as CM has pointed out, the evaluation is a black box that only a few humans-as-gods can understand. And thus we must, according to human nature, end up with a training and psych eval that is so restrictive that almost no one can have a gun in public.
Another problem is that just like the Jews in Germany, Hitler did not remove their guns, their ability to defend themselves by laws he made, but by using the laws that were already on the books, many of which are identical to the laws CM is proposing. Giving the state this blank check to restrict guns from any political enemy they see fit isn’t just a proposal in bad form, but knowing history would be downright irresponsible.
Another problem is that guns in private situations, in the home, won’t require such training or psych eval. But that won’t do, as making guns available unrestricted if one promised to keep them out of public would always end up in public somewhere. Everyone will simply say the gun is for in-home use and buy without restriction, and if they use the gun in public it would simply have to be used properly; for instance a thug tries to rob a store at gunpoint and a customer that has his in-home gun on him used it to remove the thug either by chasing him away or actually shooting him. That person would, even without training or psych eval, be exonerated because the defense of human life would take precedence over licensing… or would it? That’s the madness of the proposal. The person would not be exonerated because the state will always prefer protecting its own rules over the protection of human life. What would really result is the training and psych eval be applied to guns even if they carry the promise not to be carried in public.
Then there are mass shootings. Despite these shootings actually not being a real threat mathematically at the present time, they are used as clubs to ram restrictions down the throats of people that would use a gun ethically. And since the data, again, shows that unrestricted gun access does not result in the kinds of problems listed above (it is the antidote to these problems obviously), appealing to mass shootings is counter-productive. And beyond that, just ask any of the people in the Paris shootings if they would have preferred someone with a gun, sans license, to be available to shoot back at the terrorists. And the good thing is that more people that might have a gun, the better this scenario plays out, relative to licensing where more invites more death if taken to its logical conclusion of attempting to make the nation a gun free zone.
lain: