With the benefit of a few weeks time between the Tucson shooting and now,  I think it’s finally time to point out that this tragedy would never occurred without a gun handy. Could he have driven a car into the crowd just as easily, as so many pro-gun commentators have said on various articles and blogs? It seems unlikely, given the position of Giffords and the crowd. Not to mention that people have a much better chance of running away from a car in any place besides the open road or the middle of a parking lot. Others have claimed that if he didn’t have a gun, he would have used explosives. One would think that for the potential terrorist, bombs would be the first option, not the second. You might try searching the news for incidents of bombings in the US, but you’d be hard pressed to find them. Multiple reasons exist for the relative scarcity of bombings in the US, including that it’s hard to get your hands on good explosive material (and seriously, fertilizer bombs you can carry in a backpack will hardly do anything, as well as alerting people from afar as you come up smelling of chemicals and manure). Despite the Anarchist’s Cookbook, it’s not that easy to safely build a bomb. People may forget that the two boys who committed the Columbine shootings threw out a bunch of bombs, most or all of which failed to go off. The majority of bomb plots in the US are unsuccessful, and most people don’t make bombs in the first place because they’re unreliable and dangerous.

So one could say that regardless of whether he had a gun or not he could have tried to do the same, but would have failed to inflict anywhere near the same amount of damage. But even if you debate that point, can you debate that not many shootings would occur if nobody had guns? What, would the news be full of “car rammings” and bombings? Possibly, except they’d be prefaced with “Unsuccessful” or “Attempted”. I think probably not though, for the aforementioned reasons. But you know, people use guns precisely because they are deadly and other things are not. Sure, some people have taken a knife to somebody, but it’s often not fatal. There’s a story in the Dallas Observer about a guy who got stabbed 24 times by some former friends and lived. This website: http://www.guninformation.org/, gives statistics saying that shooting someone is 4 to 5 times more fatal than stabbing. It’s true, it’s hard to stab people and kill them without knowing what you’re doing or getting lucky, and it’s a lot harder to get lucky with a knife.

Therefore, it is obvious that it is guns which enable people to kill others with a lethality unrivaled by anything else. As a matter of fact, given this obvious truth, one would tend to think that this would spur a vigorous debate not about whether we need more gun control, but about exactly how far we should go in restricting gun control, asking who should be allowed to own guns (answer: not everybody) and how hard it should be to get them (answer: not easy).

But at the present time, instead of more gun control, we find ourselves debating the sensibility of allowing guns in even more places carried by even more people. For example, the Texas legislature is (probably) about to pass a bill allowing guns on college campuses. Never mind that studies can’t prove that more guns equals less crime. I don’t know why it’s so hard for people to see the connection between the fact that guns are ubiquitous in our society and the amount of gun crime in our society. Are American criminals inherently more criminal than, say, Japanese criminals? In other words, would they murder as much as they do without any access to guns? Taking a look at this chart, we see that the US is on the high end of first-world nations when it comes to homicides. I know the issue is complex, and it’s not to be trivialized, but it is infallibly true that gun crimes don’t happen without guns. Even the most ardent concealed carry advocate would have to agree to that! What they would argue though, is that for one, taking all guns away is unconstitutional (debatable unless you’re one of those for whom “A well regulated militia” has no meaning), and that criminals would find guns from other sources even if we eradicated all guns in the US. Of course I would remind everyone that the US is the world’s largest exporter of weapons. As a matter of fact, Mexico blames us for the wide availability of guns in Mexico. My point is that perhaps, just perhaps, we might start from the idea that less guns would equal less gun crime. Not necessarily less crime, but less gun crime, which would result in less deaths.

Bob Herbert had an excellent article on the question of exactly how much death we’re going to accept before sanity reclaims its place in our public discourse.

We’ve allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the United States, and it’s the dead and the wounded and their families who have had to pay the awful price. The idea of having large numbers of college students packing heat in their classrooms and at their parties and sporting events, or at the local pub or frat house or gymnasium, or wherever, is too stupid for words.

Just last week, a sophomore at Florida State University, Ashley Cowie, was shot to death accidentally by a 20-year-old student who, according to authorities, was showing off his rifle to a group of friends in an off-campus apartment complex favored by fraternity members. A second student was shot in the wrist. This occurred as state legislators in Florida are considering a proposal to allow people with permits to carry concealed weapons on campuses. The National Rifle Association thinks that’s a dandy idea.

Can we get a grip?

The contention of those who would like college kids and just about everybody else to be armed to the teeth is that the good guys can shoot back whenever the bad guys show up to do harm. An important study published in 2009 by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine estimated that people in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during the assault than someone in a comparable situation without a gun.

We need fewer homicides, fewer accidental deaths and fewer suicides. That means fewer guns. That means stricter licensing and registration, more vigorous background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Start with that. Don’t tell me it’s too hard to achieve. Just get started.

Well said, Mr. Herbert. Well said. How much death is enough? Not 6 people in Tucson, including a nine year old girl. Probably not any of the shootings we experience daily. Nothing seems to get through to people who insist on their right to own guns while simultaneously opposing all efforts to get some kind of reasonable controls put in place.

Here’s my idea: if you want to own a gun, you should be registered in a federal database. You should have to pass an extensive background check and mental competency test. To carry a gun in public you should have to go through the same approval process and training as police do. Why would I trust people who’ve had a 6 hour CCH class with my life? I barely trust cops, and they train for months at the academy, and then years on the job. Why is it that people like me are seen as asking too much when we say that we want to live without fear of people who insist on having the ability to end our lives? Isn’t my right to live unmolested held in such high importance that it doesn’t even need to be stated in the Constitution? Or am I supposed to believe that a two-century old clause which is meant to allow people to organize themselves into a militia to defend themselves from a tyrannical government should also allow them to have weapons which can kill me and my entire family before they even have to reload?

I’m not out to demonize gun owners. I’ve had friends who’ve had guns for years. I haven’t quit being friends with them, nor will I. But the idea that some shooter willing to accept his death will be stopped by them is ridiculous. They don’t practice quick-drawing, they don’t practice shooting in high pressure situations, they don’t do training scenarios, and they don’t ever get shot at. If some guy starts blasting people in a restaurant, it’s just as likely that anybody returning fire will miss and hit some innocent people as it is that they’ll stop the shooter. Let’s get real, people, the vast majority of gun owners are no kind of marksmen and never train for real situations. Some people do, and if a Navy SEAL, Army Delta, or just a regular police officer happens to be in a shooting situation and they pull their weapon, I’ll be happy for it. And if you’re not one of them, I’d rather not be around you. And more importantly, I think I have a right to ask that anyone who wants to carry a weapon be properly vetted and properly trained. It’s time to start talking about carrying weapons sensibly. Is that really too much to ask?