In the wake of the mass shooting in Arizona last Saturday, I have taken a look at guns and gun laws and have changed my personal view on them. We should start by banning all guns for non-military non-police purposes. Then we change criminal laws that would then call for automatic life sentences for crimes committed with a gun and automatic death sentences for any deaths caused in the commission of a crime involving a gun.
To be honest, a gun is for lazy people since it takes so little work to do so much damage. I say we ban all civilian guns so that when people want to commit a crime or murder someone they actually have to do some work using their fists, knives, or other non-gun weapons.
The argument that hunters need guns really has no merit since we don’t need to hunt for our food and if someone really needs to they can use other weapons like a bow and arrow or traps. Again takes more work. Hunting is suppose to be work – a challenge. Do we really need an AK-47 or AR-15 to hunt deer? Seriously? Guns aren’t suppose to be entertaining. Historically they were tools but like history we’ve moved on and now we can go to the store for our meat. We don’t NEED to hunt.
Of course people will say a gun ban will not keep guns from criminals. Well with a ban, guns would soon become harder to get if they can’t be made or sold in the states. Any that are found on criminals would be melted down. With less opportunity to obtain guns, it will be easier to keep track of the ones still in service like with the police. It will take time due to the thousands of guns on the market now but an outright ban would work if guns are removed and melted down.
A gun ban would also reduce health care costs since gun shot wounds are more expensive to treat than a knife or club wound. There would be a better chance of surviving an attack from a knife or blunt weapon so there would be a reduction in the number of families torn apart by a gun death.
Yes more people are killed in auto accidents than in shoot outs but driving a car is heavily regulated and that regulation has reduced traffic deaths over the years. Many of the current gun deaths would be reduced because they happen due to how easy it is to get a gun now.
Aren’t we getting tired of seeing scenes on the news like the one we saw in Tucson. How many more innocent people have to die?
The argument that civilian guns are needed to protect us from the tyranny of the government doesn’t hold water because the government has far more lethal weapons like missiles and tanks. An AR-15 doesn’t stop a tank. Taking the argument to the extreme why can we not have a nuclear warhead?
So as you can see banning all civilian guns would be beneficial to the country.
Update 07/20/2012: Yet another mass killing in Colorado at a movie theater. 12 dead and 51 wounded. Killer had a couple of semi-automatics including an AR-15 and thousands of rounds of ammo.
It’s incidents like this one that proves that semi-automatic guns are too easy to obtain for the amount of death they can do. It seems to take more work to get a driver’s license than to buy an automatic weapon.
