Gun Control

After the terrible shooting at VA Tech, many people are starting to think that maybe the U.S. needs to enact tougher gun control laws. By “many people” I mostly mean people outside the United States since Americans at large, and American politicians especially, have shown no real interest in making guns less available to the general population. The fact that there is a mountain of evidence showing that “unsuitable people” (read: crazy and/or criminal) are acquiring weapons in large quantities, and inflicting serious damage with them, does not seem to trouble most people.

To be entirely honest, it doesn’t really trouble me. One of the main problems with the lax gun laws in America is the almost pathetic regulation of the gun industry. The guns that are produced and sold in the US are often of shoddy quality, likely to lock up on you when you try to shoot them at something, and then misfire when you aren’t trying to shoot anything at all. People are remarkably likely to be injured by their own guns, which really shouldn’t be the case. And that is the thing that has bothered me the most. I sort of assume that if a person is determined to get a gun, he or she will do so no matter what laws are in place.

However, there is a factor I did not take into consideration. It seems only fair that lame gun laws in the US should cause a high rate of gun-related crime and violence in our country, but it seems that our cavalier attitude towards gun safety has a very negative affect on the world at large, and this I cannot abide. Check out these statistics:

Mexican authorities reported that 80 percent of guns in the country came from the U.S., 50 percent of handguns seized by Canada's gun crime task force were also smuggled across the U.S. border and 30 percent of guns recovered by Japanese authorities originated in the U.S., the IANSA found. (http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/04/17/gun.epidemic/index.html)

For me, this information really changes things. As much as I savor the image of stupid-ass rednecks shooting themselves in the foot with weapons they are truly too incompetent to operate, allowing that sort of Darwinian approach to guns really isn’t fair to those countries trying to keep their citizens alive as best as they can. Poor Mexico! They send us their hardest working sons and daughters, and in exchange get crates of death-inflicting appliances. And how the hell did so many American-made guns make it to Japan?! Japan has very strict gun laws, but I guess the Yakuza has got to be using something.