Guns and Such

I am writing this in response to a couple of things.  One is that I have wanted to, for a while, address the misconception of the meaning of the statement "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."  Also, one of the comments a judge wrote on my recent essay is that it is unlikely that such a thing could happen in a country that allowed its citizens to have guns, and that other countries are unlikely to have adequate technology. The last point, about the technology, is what I would like to address first, as it is the simplest point to refute.  America is one of the only industrialized nations that allows its citizens to carry guns so easily.  Even Switzerland, which pro-gun activists often point to as a country with lots of guns but not lots of crime, has every single firearm in the country registered.  This being the case, one only needs to pick randomly from among other highly industrialized nations to find one with fewer guns and perfectly adequate surveillance technology.  For instance, there was, fairly recently, and article in the Index on Censorship on the subject of CCTV surveillance in the United Kingdom.  The introduction to the article pointed out that so much of Great Britain is covered by CCTV cameras that people have started to feel unsafe whenever one is not in sight.  And while the UK is the only country (to my knowledge) that already has such a surveillance program in place, any other European country, as well as Australia, Canada, Japan, and any country that buys technology from one of these countries, has the technology readily available to enact a domestic surveillance program. I am now going to postpone discussing the idea that guns protect us from a government seeking to become autocratic, because this is the central argument to nearly all militia and gun-rights groups.  Instead, I would like to address the common saying that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."  Technically, this statement is true.  Another true statement can be made by replacing the word "guns" with virtually any other word that comes to mind.  ("If pet ferrets are outlawed, only outlaws will have pet ferrets.")  Clearly, the central point of the initial argument is that, with criminals still posessing guns, we law-abiding citizens need our own guns as protection against said criminals. This claim fails to acknowledge that the line between law-abiding citizens and criminals is not only hazy but also subject to radical changes based on the opportunity to commit a crime.  For example, the two high school students who attacked Columbine two years ago were probably no more disturbed than certain students at any other high school throughout the country and the world.  As much as we like to find things that made those two qualitatively different from "normal" people, the difference is only one of extent and opportunity.  The issue of extent is only that they decided to actually take out their anger on fellow students.  The issue of opportunity is obviously related to the availability of guns.  Pipe bombs or no, if they didn't have access to submachine guns, they wouldn't have killed so many people.  In all likelihood, they wouldn't have even taken it upon themselves to do anything violent.  After all, guns give the person who has them a sense of security which can border on supposed invincibility.  Just look at soldiers going off to do battle.  They clutch their guns more closely to their bodies than loved ones, yet a gun isn't going to protect you against a land mine or fragmentation grenade or napalm.  Guns will also accomplish nothing against a knife-armed criminal who has the advantage of surprise in a dark alley.  Sure, you'll feel safer with the gun, but if the other guy also has a gun, he can shoot you in the back just as easily as if you were unarmed. Obviously, who becomes a criminal depends on who commits a crime.  What is less obvious is that who commits a crime depends (partly) on how easy it is to commit that crime.  There are no doubt countless individuals who have never commited a crime because they have never had the opportunity, in the form of a weapon that can kill a dozen other human beings without being within a dozen yards of any of them.  There are also no doubt many people who wouldn't have ever killed anybody if it wasn't for the fact that they happened to have a gun available.  One example of this type of crime is Columbine.  There are also many examples of opportunistic murder in the form of excessive road rage.  It seems like every few days, somewhere in the country, another person gets shot by an outraged driver for cutting him or her off or failing to signal or some equally trivial matter.  Clearly, if the overly sensitive driver had a few seconds to calm down, nothing violent would occured.  Unfortunately, ther happened to be a gun in the glove compartment, or under the front seat, or wherever.  Sure, there is something wrong with the person who shoots another person because of driving habits, but the point is that this person wouldn't be able to shoot the other person in rage if they didn't happen to have a gun available. Now we get to the argument that citizens need guns to protect themselves from a government seeking to become autocratic.  Part of the counterargument for this idea comes from the fact I already mentioned about how guns aren't going to save you from somebody with superior weapons or the element of surprise.  If this better-armed person wants you to go to jail, and you have lots of guns, all they have to do is come in the middle of the night and send a smokebomb through your bedroom window.  Then any number of guns aren't going to do any good.  Or say you are really paranoid, and have your own private arsenal.  Then they can just bomb your house and get it over with without ever having to take you to jail.  After all, if all they want to do is eliminate dissidents, it doesn't really matter whether you're alive or dead.  They can just make your death look like an accident, which wouldn't be hard, given that you had that whole arsenal.  If you're even more paranoid than that, and live in a bomb shelter in addition to having a private arsenal, they can just pour some concrete over the entrance and forget about you. Now, the NRA proposes that everybody needs a gun if we are to adequately protect ourselves from criminals and governments.  This is just stupid.  Do you really think that things would be better if every single citizen had a gun?  Imagine every conflict you've ever been in, particularly if it escalated to some sort of physical violence.  Would that situation have been better if both of you had a gun? If every driver had a gun under the front seat, how many cops do you think would be shot while merely trying to keep drunk drivers off the road?  Okay, so drunks wouldn't be very good shots, but people are also pulled over for speeding and swerving and driving down the wrong sides of streets.  All of these people are dangerous, and if the police can't somehow punnish them for endangering their own lives as well as those of others, how will our society get any better?