Fri 15 Sep 2006
The title for this post is a wish of mine.
I wish there were no guns in the world. Sounds cliche, I know. They cause more harm then good (and the only “good” people may think of is for hunting purposes, and self defense).
In terms of hunting, I don’t think hunting is important enough, however, to justify the existence of guns. I don’t care for hunting as sport, but for those who need to do it for a livelihood/food, there are other ways to do it.
In terms of self-defence, if there weren’t any guns in the first place to provide a threat, people wouldn’t need guns to defend themselves with. Yes, there are other weapons, and it’s unfortunate that they are used in ways other than as tools.
Of course, this post is inspired by the Dawson shootings in Montreal, but I have always felt this way. The fact that someone invented guns infuriates me.
On a similar line of thought, the fact that someone created a video game based on the Columbine shootings makes me want to puke. Who in their right mind would enjoy playing such a game?! Never mind CREATE it!
I know this is a contraversial thing to say, and I expect I’ll get some comments about how guns are “important”, and “helful” in some cases, but this is how I feel.
September 15th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
I won’t tell you that guns are important or helpful. Regardless of whether or not they are, regardless of whether you like them or not, they exist, and will continue to do so. Gun control is nothing more than reducing access and controlling law-abiding citizens, not eliminating completely.
But much as you said you could hunt without a gun, so too could a murderous sociopath find other ways to do harm. The gun itself is nothing more than a tool to bring about violence. If it is not guns, it may be knives, swords, baseball bats, or worse; Nuclear and Biological attacks.
In the end, the goal is not to eliminate the tools of harm themselves, but to attempt to better humanity - to eliminate the factors that contribute to high-risk individuals such as poverty - to lead by example. It’s like trying to fight a disease - you will never cure the disease if all you treat are the symptoms…
So regardless of whether or not you like or dislike guns, the issue is not, nor has ever been a barrel, a hammer, and a trigger.
September 15th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
I completely agree with you Kirk. I just felt like complaining about guns. To talk about bettering humanity, reducing anger and hatred through the example of love and kindness…that’ll be another blog post. And I will write that someday.
September 16th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
I’d like to chime in here. It is very difficult to kill one and injury more than 10 people with a knife, baseball bat, whatever (save WMDs which should be outlawed too!). If the person had such a weapon at Dawson College most people would have been able to run away. Naturally you should target the source of a problem (ie, poverty, race relations, whatever), but you should also treat the symptoms to minimize the harm done to innocent bystanders.
Incidentally, while guns don’t necessarily kill people, studies have shown that people are more violent and aggressive when simply holding a gun than not.
September 17th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
That’s a fair argument. I guess the point I was trying to make wasn’t necessarily to NOT get rid of handguns, but that getting rid of them without tackling the larger issues is useless. Which basically means we agree.
And I too pondered the idea that the incident in Montreal would have been vastly different without a gun, but it’s also possible that without such a weapon, this individual may have sought other ways to strike at people - perhaps not in public, but going after people one at a time, which could in fact be more dangerous in the long run. In fact, some individual serial killers are believed to have killed hundreds of people. Kind of scary to think about, actually…
September 18th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
I had the same reaction as you did, Ana, when I heard about the videogame for Columbine. I didn’t know such a thing existed, because I obviously wouldn’t ever go looking for it, and it made me feel ill just hearing about it. Fortunately, I’ve never known anyone touched by this kind of violence, but the feeling of helplessness, I think, overwhelms us all during these times.
Although gun control legislation certainly helps in making it more difficult to obtain a gun, I don’t know that there is, or will ever be, legislation strong enough to stop people from obtaining them. So with that, I agree with you … I wish they had never been invented.