Why Liberals are Wrong About Gun Control

Gun control is hot on the burner again. Liberals have the fantasy that if we put regulations on the ownership of guns, like liberals have put enormous regulations on business, this will solve the problems of the lunatics who go out and kill innocent victims.  This will be as effective in preventing these crazy killings as the business regulations have been on improving business.  In states where there has been gun control, the problem still exists.  We will always have crazy people who do horrible things, whether they do it with guns, like in Newtown, or with a knife, like in China this week.

Liberals want a simple solution because the problem with these murders registers with the least logical part of their brains, their emotions.  If we keep people from getting guns, then people cannot shoot other people with guns and the problems with guns will be solved.  Presto.

If this were only true.

Max Fisher, in the Washington Post (12-14-2012) speaks to the fact that the USA has a significantly higher number of gun-related killings than all other developed country--about 20 percent higher than average.  This means, according to Fisher, that you are twenty times more likely to die of a gunshot wound in the USA than in most other nations.  (Curiously, Mexico, Syria, Libya, and Egypt were not mentioned).  It almost sounds like just by going out your door, you stand a really good shot at getting shot.  

It's the old liberal mathematical fallacy about cause and effect: the more guns, the more people will be killed by guns.  That's like saying that 97.3% of all people who died of lung cancer in the USA were daily users of toilet paper, therefore toilet paper causes cancer.

Professor Stephen P. Segal studied murder rates and mental treatment policies in a report entitled "Civil Commitment Law, Mental Health and Services and US Homicide Rates."  The shocker was his finding that "less access to psychiatric inpatient beds, and more poorly rated mental health systems were associated with increases in homicide rates of 1.08 and 0.26 per 100,000, respectively."  And the real clincher was the fact that there was a far different rate of homicides between states with different involuntary civil commitment (ICC) laws.  Segal stated: "Broader ICC criteria were associated with 1.42 less homicides per 100,000."  In other words, the easier it was to commit some crazy person with homicidal tendencies, the greater the decrease in homicide--the decrease being around 1/3 fewer incidents.  In fact, where the prison population was examined in Indiana, it was found that at least 18% who committed violent crimes with firearms, were schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill.

So the NRA is correct in saying that guns don't kill people; people kill people.  But even more importantly, seriously mentally ill people kill people at disproportionate rates.  

As a former psychotherapist-turned-writer, I believe that a big part of the problem lies within the entertainment industry.  Movies glorify violence and video games gives you practice at it, but with a detached, psychological distance.  Interestingly, the movie industry is overwhelmingly liberal (just ask Obama), and liberals are the biggest anti-gun group on earth.

We need to be silently respectful.  We need to bury those little children and hug our own.  We need to come up with real solutions rather than "feel good solutions," because those do not work.

We need to love, and we need to pray.  We need to treat each other better--we're all Americans, but you almost wouldn't know it anymore with the current administration.

Peace and love.

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