Gun Control & RKBA

You cannot fix the problem if you refuse to correctly and accurately identify the problem. Suicides via gun is a distinct and separate issue from gang shootings, which is a separate and distinct issue from friend/family shootings, which is a separate and distinct issue from spree killings.

Over 41 thousand people committed suicide last year; less than half used a gun. Magazine limits and bans on "assault weapons" will not address gun-related suicides, which occur in the privacy and leisure of a person's home and involve only 1 cartridge.

The US crime rate dropped in half from 1991 to 2010 or so, and it had nothing to do with gun laws, it had to do with 2 seemingly-unrelated progressive policies: cleaning the air and giving women control of their reproductive system.

To fight smog, we mandated catalytic converters on cars. But the lead in gasoline clogged the converters, so we outlawed leaded gasoline. Within a couple of years, the air was virtually free of airborne lead, and the children born after 1974 or so had far less lead in their tissues.

Lead causes brain damage, making children dumber, more violent, and less able to control their impulses or to plan long-term. When the lead was removed from the air, the children stopped being poisoned by it. Thus, when the new generation of lead-free children became teenagers and thus most likely to become violent criminals, far fewer of them became violent criminals because their brains were normal. This would have been around... 1989.


Likewise, women's rights expanded to both birth control and abortion, meaning that more women were having children at "the right time" and thus able to raise them better than in the older says, when women simply had to have as many kids as nature said, when nature said, and then had to try to raise them under far more adverse conditions.

The Pill and the IUD became popular in the mid-to-late sixties, so the effect of having fewer kids born into situations where they were likely to become violent criminals would have been... in the mid-to-late 80's.


Progressive social and economic policies save lives, but we can't get them passed with Republicans running things. And as long as the solution to gun violence is seen as a hardware problem, it will:
a) politically mobilize gun owners to a far greater extent than non-gun-owners
b) not address the root causes of violence and depression, thus not changing murder rates or suicide rates.