The cover of this week's Economist (above) says it well. This is America's image today: a culture wherein the solution to any problem from an imagined insult to a paranoid fear of "big government" is resolved at gun point.
Blame movies and TV crime shows where the heroes and bad guys all tote handguns as if they were extensions of their anatomy. Blame the street-corner gang, where packing a weapon is the desperate assurance of a teen-ager's masculinity. Blame the merchants, like the owner of the online firearms store who sold the weapons to both the student who massacred 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech and the angry grad student who killed five and wounded 18 in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University before shooting himself. Blame the misguided gun enthusiasts who preach that we should tote pistols to work, restaurants, ball games, class and even church.
Above all blame the pusillanimous politicians who have sold their souls to the National Rifle Association at the cost of 100,000 shootings in the United States every year. Would that President Obama now muster his courage and rhetoric to teach the American people why the federal government must serve the people by disarming them.
The Boston blogger Jerome Grossman has proposed an answer: Uniform regulations in all states; required physical, medical, and written tests and training in firearms. All guns must be kept in the local police station and signed out for use. Therefore the right to own a gun for a reason—police, hunter, target shooter—would be protected; but guns would not be available to shoot one's spouse or one's self, to settle an argument, or for children to play with.
An inconvenience? Yes. But how much do we really value the life of a Congresswoman, a judge, or a nine-year-old girl?
Raymond A. Schroth, S.J.
I suspect that the BUSINESS of guns is at the bottom of this grand myth. The #1 America export is weaponry. This is what America gives to the world. Not wheat, not technology, but guns.
Is this the example of the "new civility" we are called to in light of the Arizona shooting?
Unless there is a great amount of reasoning associated with the call to ban private guns, rather than these type of jeremiads, I remain skeptical of the solution proposed here: greater government regulation by these same "pusillanimous" politicians. Thus the wisdom of the Founders: certain rights free from government, i.e. "pusillanimous" regulation. The suggestion herein that having to take tests in order to obtain a gun shows the author's ignorance of current gun regulations. The notion of having police lock up our guns sends a shiver down my spine; the author should see what my local police department (New Orleans) has done before suggesting we're safer giving all our guns to them.
Such an alienated message needs to be rejected for its crudeness and lack of insight. Nothing is more tedious than to have some off-shore wonder with little knowledge or contact with Americans to essntially tell us how evil America is.
Hating America is a bad business to be in but espeically for people claiming to be morally aware or enlightened. A recheck of thinking is needed on these hate- America themes. This thinking is a product of severe insularity.
But it is wonderful that people can shoot off ideas without penalty in AMerica. But most people will not listen. Being alienated from American culture and its roots is a very sad condition of ignorance and alienation.
I CAN SEE THE BENEFITS FOR THE WHOLE CHURCH STRUCTURE, AND NOT JUST THE PARISHIONERS, AND THE LOCAL COMMUNITY. IT MIGHT ACTUALLY MAKE IT 'SAFER' TO ENGAGE IN REAL DIALOGUE IN OUR FAITH COMMUNITIES.
INTERESTING HOW THIS GOT LOST IN THE COMMENTS ABOUT GUNS!
The President's political support has collapsed primarily in places where guns are part of the culture, and not in the ways this blog posts mistakenly presents. Let him try to enforce the types of provisions you are advocating here, and you will ensure that Dick Cheney's statements comes true.
And there ARE regulations such as tests, waiting periods, and screenings already in place. Shocking as it may seem, sometimes deranged people do deranged things, and no amount of government regulation will stop it.
Some amount of government regulation will stop deranged people, but these people need to be given some kind of attention as well as not being allowed access to weapons.
Do you realize how ridiculous that statement is!
15" knife blades OK?
Free access to dangerous chemicals?
Unregulated access to motor vehicles?
You could probably save more lives by forcing the integration of a global positioning system and a speed governor into automobiles so that they can't exceed the speed limit. I feel it is much more probable that some idiot will kill me with a car than shoot me.
But I DO agree that some people shouldn't have guns and some people shouldn't have cars and some neither. The fanatical lack of regulation supported by the NRA is going to backfire on them and the rest of us.