More Guns, More Gun Crimes

James Wolcott concisely expresses one of the thoughts that I've held for some time about the premise that owning guns makes you safer.

"To Second Amendment fanatics, the only answer to gun violence is yet more guns, more people packing sidearms to gun down would-be assailants, the decorous streets of Baghdad, Baltimore, and Philadelphia providing such heartening support for this more-guns-equals-more-security thesis.

It never seems to occur to our national simplifiers that many of the homicides in this country are not committed by career Bad People but by seemingly Good People who psychotically snap or lose their tempers in an altercation; and that there are plenty of Bad People in this country who, while expressing their destructive impulses in a myriad of ways, manage not to pick up a weapon and leave a multiple death toll. The notion that the answer to gun violence is to allow Good People to arm themselves and to keep guns out of the itchy paws of Bad People is a fatuous fantasy, particularly since the gun lobby and gun merchants work so strenuously to keep laws and regulations lax and loosy-goosy, regardless of the human consequences."