Gun Control: It’s the Economy, Stupid

I have to say, I like guns.

This topic is a little off base of what I usually write about here, so I’ll be brief, but I do think it’s important.

New York Representative Carolyn McCarthy recently dusted off old H.R. 1022, which you can track here via OpenCongress.

A summary of the bill follows:

A bill, also known as the Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2007, that greatly expands the list of prohibited weapons. The definition of a semiautomatic assault weapon is broadened in the bill, to include many guns that are currently legal. The text of this bill contains a long list of specific guns that would become illegal to possess, if it were enacted. Additionally, it would make the private transfer of any assault weapon illegal.

Now, a lot of bloggers are going nuts about this bill — “The Dems are trying to take away all our guns!” and “This is 10x worse than Clinton!” and “THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!”

But if they looked closely, they would notice that this bill is absolutely 100% D.O.A.

First of all, it has NO co-sponsors (nobody else is dumb enough to support it).

Second of all, it’s been referred back to Committee, where it will most likely die an inglorious death.

It’s probably just horse-trading.

Nobody is willing to sign on with her, because not only is anti-gun legislation largely ineffective from a policy standpoint, it’s also an absolute non-starter from a political standpoint.

Standing Armies vs Well-Organized Militia
Bills like this, and gun-control legislation in general, always comes back to the 2nd Amendment: Let’s review:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This is a Jeffersonian concept that is related to the idea that the free State would not be keeping standing armies. Since we do have a standing army (and an extremely expensive one at that), some anti-gun activists will say that there is no need for a well-regulated militia.

To which I reply: a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state, would be desperately needed in such times that the freedom of said State was under attack by aforementioned standing army.

To wit: Bush’s grab for control of the National Guard.
To wit: Corporations empowered to raise their own standing armies.
To wit: our ‘broken’ Armed Forces , over-stretched because of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and now possibly Iran), and their current inability to protect our own nation in the (admittedly unlikely) event of an attack on our own soil.

If this country continues it’s slide into corporate autocracy, I’m sure that pretty soon a whole lot of Democrats are going to wish they owned assault rifles, and a whole lot of Republicans are going to be glad they do.

Urban vs Rural
Others argue that gun control is really an issue between the soft-palmed sissy urbanites — locked in their glass condos for fear of the gritty urban gun battles taking place in the ‘bad’ parts of their city — and the rural gun owners, those rugged individualists who are either salt-of-the-earth hunters or crazy survivalists stockpiling bunkers of illegal assault weapons, depending who you ask.

I think it’s unquestionable that urbanites and others living in metropolitan areas have a much different relationship with firearms than rural people.

It’s easy, when you are in a city and hearing about people get shot weekly or even daily, to be logical and think “Well, the guns are the problem. We should just ban all the guns and then nobody would get shot.”

On the other hand, the rural people, who have grown up around guns and treat them with respect and understand their power, can’t get their heads around this. “Take away our guns? Yeah, when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers.”

Urbanites, of course, then decide that anyone who was so strongly in favor of gun ownership must be a bloodthirsty thug — since all the people they associate with gun use in the city are either thugs or other People of Low Moral Fiber.

But they’ve got it backwards, because when you go out into the country, “gun people” are often the nicest people around.

This is the disconnection between urban morality and rural morality: In dense urban areas, there are gang wars, drug deals, “reps” to protect, and guns will be made available as tools in these social constructs regardless of their legality, since they are part of American culture.

In rural areas, a different kind of morality holds sway — more traditional moral and family values, respect for nature and the environment, respect for individual liberties and the power of guns. The cultural love of guns holds true here, too, but here, the guns are used in an entirely different way.

These are broad characterizations and as such obviously gloss over subtlety and nuance, but I think are no less useful for all that.

So it should be easy to see why the argument so quickly gets out of hand between an urban anti-gun liberal and a conservative pro-gun rural: they’re arguing across cultures and moral systems. The issue of gun control is really incidental to their argument.

Here’s the reality: guns don’t kill people, PEOPLE with guns kill people. And the legal or restricted status of guns in urban areas will do absolutely diddly-squat to curb gun violence and violence in general.

You think criminals can’t get guns once they’re outlawed? If they want guns, they can get guns. If anything outlawing certain weapons makes them MORE likely to be available on the black market.

It’s the Economy, Stupid
I believe that the presence or absence of guns really has nothing to do with the rates and levels of inner-city violence.

People’s subjective feelings of happiness and hope, on the other hand, do.

When the economy is up, and unemployment is low, and real wages are rising (adjusted for inflation) and the poorest 10% of our population believes they have a chance to better their circumstances, crime will be low, because the perceived risks associated with criminal behavior will outweigh the perceived potential rewards that could probably more easily (and less riskily) be gained by legitimate employment or other opportunities.

When the economy is down, and unemployment is high, and real wages are stagnant or falling, and the poorest 10% of our population believes that they have been forgotten by the politicians and all sectors of the economy, then crime will rise, because the perceived rewards of criminal behavior will outweigh any other perceived rewards that an individual could gain by other means.

In closing, I believe all citizens of the United States should be able to purchase long arms, handguns, semiautomatic and automatic assault rifles, so long as they go through a mandatory gun safety and usage training course, and registered each and every weapon they owned as well as disclosed ammunition amounts.

I also believe that all gun-owning citizens should be required to take independently-verified marksmanship tests, the results of which would be tabulated and placed in a state database, so the state could evaluate the quality and amount of firepower that was available to it in the event of a “citizen’s militia” call-up.

Finally, I believe the Fed should butt out of state’s rights and the existing state militias (National Guard). In this respect I am all for strengthening state control and Governors at the expense of the Federal system.

And to conclude, a photo of the Israeli TAV-21 assault rifle, a gun I’d quite enjoy owning:

Sorority Purge Shows College Women As Shallow Bitches

A NY Times article, Sorority Evictions Raise Issues of Look and Bias, raises some hard questions about how college women behave.

Not really.

As if we needed any more proof that college women (and especially college women in sororities) are shallow and vindictive, the story details how a tiny sorority at a tiny college in Greencastle, Indiana — student population 2,400 — effectively kicked out all their overweight, ugly, black, Korean of Vietnamese women.

The purging, initiated by the sorority chapter’s higher-ups from Delta Zeta headquarters in Oxford, Ohio, was probably in response to an annual psychology professor’s survey that asked students to characterize the different sorority groups on campus.

While other sororities got labels like “Daddy’s little princesses” and “Offbeat hippies”, Delta Zeta claimed the prize: “socially awkward”.

Let me point out that the psychology professor, a Ms. Pam Propsom, conducted this little survey ostensibly under the guise of part of her psychology class. My question is, exactly how valuable is a survey that asks students to stereotype sorority girls?

To show the power of stereotypes? College women ought to have learned that lesson well enough in high school.

So a female psychology professor initiates a catty popularity-contest “survey” with questionable educational value, and other catty women, in charge and trying to damage control the bad PR their precious sorority is getting, swoop in from Delta Zeta headquarters, interview 35 sorority members ostensibly in the context of their “commitment” to the organization, and kick out the 25 ugliest and fattest.

And, then the NY Times picks up the story and exposes them all as silly bitches.

You really need to look at the article to see the awful justice in full light of day — the story includes photos of many of the women kicked out, and it’s true, they are not pretty, and they are overweight.

But kicking them out on these grounds and trying to cover it with a tissue-thin fantasy about their lack of commitment is just laughable.

Just more evidence to confirm what I’ve always believed: sorority women at that age are pretty sad. Even sadder are the adult ones who never grow out of the mindset. I’d say they are good for one thing only (sex), but my experience is, often they are disappointing even in bed.

Porn. Porn where they would all excel — not only would it give them an outlet for their catty, competitive energy, it would give them a paycheck for acting fake.