After reading “retired diplomat” Dan Simpson’s non-muted plea for a totalitarian dictatorship to protect us from ourselves, I needed something to wash the stench of fascism from my nostrils

Policy wonk John Q. Wilson, from Pepperdine, arrived on cue:

  So far, not many prominent Americans have tried to use the college rampage as an argument for gun control. One reason is that we are in the midst of a presidential race in which leading Democratic candidates are aware that endorsing gun control can cost them votes.

I switched from being a gun-controller by habit to a Second Amendment activist about the same time as I became a conservative, during college.  It was a time when I despaired of ever seeing things as they are today…

…with gun control the notion of punishing the law-abiding for the crimes of the guilty being considered as big a third rail as, say, rationalizing Social Security.

Who says there’s no progress?

This concern has not prevented the New York Times from editorializing in favor of “stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage.” Nor has it stopped the European press from beating up on us unmercifully.

Leading British, French, German, Italian and Spanish newspapers have blamed the United States for listening to Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Assn. Many of their claims are a little strange. At least two papers said we should ban semiautomatic assault weapons (even though the killer did not use one); another said that buying a machine gun is easier than getting a driver’s license (even though no one can legally buy a machine gun);  [Not actually true; if you pony up a big registration fee and pass a background check not a whole lot less intrusive than that for a Top Secret security clearance, you can get a Class III license, which allows you to buy fully-automatic machine guns.  In seventy years, exactly one person with a Class III license has committed a crime; it was a cop] a third wrote that gun violence is becoming more common (when in fact the U.S. homicide rate has fallen dramatically over the last dozen years).

But what are facts when one has a pseudo-religious  crusade at hand!

Note to Dan Simpson – and others who think that banning guns in the hands of the law-abiding is some sort of panacaea that’d lead us to a crime-free Eden:

If we want to guess by how much the U.S. murder rate would fall if civilians had no guns, we should begin by realizing — as criminologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have shown — that the non-gun homicide rate in this country is three times higher than the non-gun homicide rate in England. For historical and cultural reasons, Americans are a more violent people than the English, even when they can’t use a gun. This fact sets a floor below which the murder rate won’t be reduced even if, by some constitutional or political miracle, we became gun-free.

Of course, to many European observers, facts aren’t as important as agenda:

AS FOR THE European disdain for our criminal culture, many of those countries should not spend too much time congratulating themselves. In 2000, the rate at which people were robbed or assaulted was higher in England, Scotland, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Sweden than it was in the United States. The assault rate in England was twice that in the United States. In the decade since England banned all private possession of handguns, the BBC reported that the number of gun crimes has gone up sharply.

Oh, and strict, Euro-style gun control doesn’t prevent

Some of the worst examples of mass gun violence have also occurred in Europe. In recent years, 17 students and teachers were killed by a shooter in one incident at a German public school; 14 legislators were shot to death in Switzerland, and eight city council members were shot to death near Paris.    

The main lesson that should emerge from the Virginia Tech killings is that we need to work harder to identify and cope with dangerously unstable personalities.

And there’s the rub.  Advocates for the mentally-ill have made it very difficult – for some good reasons and some not-so-good ones – for the public to know a whole lot about peoples’  mental health backgrounds.  Knowing more about Cho’s judicial commitment, for example, might have done a lot more good to prevent the VT tragedy than putting more petty roadblocks in the way of the law-abiding gun owner.

It is a problem for Europeans as well as Americans, one for which there are no easy solutions — such as passing more gun control laws.

But like most such solutions, it’s not about solving things so much as helping a powerful and well-connected but impotent clicque feel that they’re doing something, even if that something is utterly useless.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 5:44 am and is filed under Crime and Punishment, Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.