The "Lone Crazy" Fallacy
A lot of the pro-gun types are saying:
"Gun control couldn't have stopped this guy. Nothing can stop the determined lone maniac."
The "lone maniac" in this case was a perfectly sane, law-abiding student, as far as anyone who sold him a gun knows.
This guy was focused. He waited one month to get past the waiting period so that he could buy a second gun.
Not a maniac. A murderer. A focused, determined, legally-armed murderer.
The gun nuts will blather on about "culture". They'll talk about "values" and how the country's going to pot. They'll bitch about rap music and video games.
And they'll try to blame this shooting on a person--an aberrant psychotic.
The implicit assumption is that they, and every one of the NRA zombies, are "normal".
So was he.
And so are most of the people who kill or maim hundreds of thousands of Americans per year. Right up until the point when they walk into a school and start spraying the place with lead.
If it had been illegal to posess handguns without some sort of permit or screening, or indeed at all, he might have been stopped.
To oppose gun control in the environment where this sort of thing happens is to be complicit in the killings.
In Baghdad today, four near-simultaneous car bombs killed 120 people. I mention this because for some reason, it barely made the news today.
posted by Metro @ 9:22 am
2 Comments:
"..... pro-gun types are saying:
"Gun control couldn't have stopped ... the determined lone maniac" ...
Bonjour M Metro
From this side of the Pond, the strange American obsession with the abundant & minimally controlled supply of guns seems bizarre, irrational & irresponsible ... asnd selfish
You of course cannot stop ALL deermined maniacs from murdering
However, the abundant availability of guns certainly did not prevent or inhibit this Wretch from carrying out so many atrocities so easily & in so brief a time
How can we persuade our gun-supporting American friends to re-think their position and to turn towardds a better system of fire-arms controls
Your obedt servt
G E
I think the problem here is that due to the Constitutional clause, the people framing the debate are exactly the ones who wish to own loads of heavy weaponry, and should probably least be allowed to do so.
Many of the people defending the current unregulated regime seem to actually believe that the second they surrender their Mach 10s and Tek 9s, the black helicopters will swoop in from behind the clouds and scoop them up.
Unfortunately, in the era of George W. Bush such paranoia is actually understandable, notwithstanding that it's still paranoid.
Part of the duty of a US soldier is to refuse illegal orders. That is, orders that attack America's democracy and citizens.
To demand the "right" to cling to one's armament stockpile to defend oneself against one's own country--when the country is the US--seems to me an insult to the men and women who wear the uniform.
Unfortunately, gun owners form a large special-interest group with deep pockets (the poor are often more concerned with butter than guns). So much so that Dubya's first statement on the murders was, in essence, "Yeah, another guy with a gun killed a buncha folks--big whoop! We still gotta have 'em."
The US can change and has done so before on this. Efforts such as the Brady bill (enacted after the assasination attempt on Ronald Reagan) to control handguns, and the Clinto assault weapons ban, which limited the size of magazines and proscribed, among others, the single most popular gang-banger weapon, are clear indications that with the political will in Congress, US gun control can be enacted.
But Dubya actively courts the gun nuts. He allowed the assault weapons ban to expire, and as is usual, will fight in the face of fact and history to please his "base" and cling to his margin of power.
Unfortunately, President-in-Waiting Obama has chosen to stay silent on the issue also. Perhaps President-in-Waiting Pelosi might take the issue up.
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