Yet the gun enthusiasts do have one point on their side: for all the horror of these massacres, they are only a small part of the story of gun violence in America. Most casualties of gun violence will not die at the hands of a mentally disturbed killer seeking random victims. Most gun casualties occur in the course of quarrels and accidents between people who would be described as \u201claw-abiding, responsible gun owners\u201d up until the moment when they lost their temper or left a weapon where a 4-year-old could find it and kill himself or his sister.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s a convenient theory.\u00a0 It fits nicely with the narrative – that it’s the presence of guns, not the people, that’s the problem.<\/p>\n
“Most” gun casualties, as in “the vast majority”, are suicides.\u00a0 All of which are tragic;\u00a0seeing to peoples’ mental health and preventing suicide is important.\u00a0\u00a0But\u00a0it is in no way the same as street crime.<\/p>\n
Of those?\u00a0 Most\u00a0occur as a result of “quarrels”, all right – quarrels between rival gangs, or between drug dealers arguing over turf, or adolescent gang wannabees who feel “disrespected”, or small-time hoods who lose their temper or their control and turn crimes of convenience into crimes of passion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While Frum isn’t Heather Martens or David Bloomberg or Doug Grow, he does share some of their congenital illogic about the issue:<\/p>\n
As David Hemenway notes in his study Private Guns, Public Health, Americans have experienced similar debates in the recent past. \u201cCars don\u2019t kill people; bad drivers kill people,\u201d could have been the slogan of the auto industry when it resisted safety regulation in the 1960s. The garment industry could have argued: \u201cFlammable pajamas don\u2019t kill children; careless smokers kill children.\u201d And so on. Every accident has many causes, of course, and public safety progresses by addressing each one. To reduce car fatalities, we both installed seat belts and cracked down on drunken driving. Child deaths by fire have been reduced both because pajamas are safer and because adults smoke less.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0Are we supposed to believe that David Frum, a leading public intellectual of the center-center-center-sorta-right, doesn’t know the difference between “making a product do its main job – carrying people, clothing children – safer against the vagaries and tragedies of normal life” and “misuse of a product that is designed <\/em>to violently poke holes in things”?<\/p>\nI’d certainly hope so.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Likewise, better mental-health provision would contribute to the reduction of gun massacres. But America\u2019s uniquely grisly record of gun death cannot be addressed without addressing guns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“Addressing guns”, like “we have to doooooooooooo something”, is one of those vague, generalized blandishments that shows the writer is out of ideas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And after this past year, I suspect the anti-gun movement is exactly that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, I’m being hyperbolic.\u00a0 David Frum is not an idiot. But he is no more accurate than any other liberal on Second Amendment issues – as we see in his Daily Beast insta-opinion on the Navy Yard shooting, which is chock-full of enough ripe inaccuracy to be a Heather Martens piece. He tries to diagnose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,7,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-alt-media","category-crime-and-punishment","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38436"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49801,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38436\/revisions\/49801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}