There was this town I spent a few years living in, it was a sort of planned city in Michigan called Grand Haven right alongside Lake Michigan it was beautiful, had a harbor,flourishing downtown and great schools. It kept growing and growing, my father told me one day about the close-the-door mentality that a lot of the other locals had right as they moved in.
Let us in, then close the doors behind. Each new person or family that came in had that same feeling,"I'm ok to move-in but I don't think anyone else should come here after me, you don't want all the riff-raff following us and ruining this nice community". Each person saw them-self as exempt yet after them who knows...
I see the same "I was here first" argument with guns. Everybody with their guns sees themselves as the exception to the rule.
Oh sure, I can have my guns, look at me, I've never accidentally shot someone and I certainly won't go crazy and shoot up a school, but lets focus on mental health eh?
Each person has this idea that conflicts with the primary reason for owning a gun. The "you never know" mentality, the speculative assumption affirming the necessity of owning a gun. They buy the gun for protection because they believe that at some point their life will be threatened by somebody. They hold this speculation, this 1:1000 prediction of a gun coming in handy after all, yet at the very same time throw out the more common speculation that they themselves may ever accidentally harm a family member or irrationally grow unstable and shoot up a school or loved one in a fit of rage.
The "It'll never happen to me" mentality seems to only apply to the higher statistical odds of shooting someone accidentally or through a psychotic episode than of personal defense. Buy a gun because you have a premonition that it will most certainly happen that you'll need that gun, but dont follow the premonition more statistically proven that you will kill someone wrongly.
The hypocrisy is staggering to me, but I have it as well. I've had that happen to me too, I want a gun, not for protection, just for fun, to go shoot cans in a backyard or maybe a spider in my living room(P99 or M4-A1). The argument is that I'll never go crazy, that'll never happen to me. Close the door behind you...
But it's junk, it's absolute junk. I don't know what could happen in the future I could go nuts or I could take an argument too far with a neighbor that steals my firewood. I love gun culture but not enough to think of owning one at my house, would I want one if another guy had one sitting outside my house? Yeah.
But the odds of that are much lower than the odds of my gun going in my face because I wanted to check down the barrel to see if there's one in the chamber.
Ban em' I say. Ban them all the way down to just a bolt action hunting rifle and arrows. We have taser guns that fire faster than the response time it'd take to pull the trigger so why not?
I'd rather be accidentally tased than accidentally shot. I've been shot with a steel ball bearing about the size and weight of a pinball at 400fps and its a very sh!tty experience(call my brother for confirmation), but I can't imagine the pain of being shot through because you were mistaken for a burglary by an antsy girlfriend behind the door.
Ban them? But it's in the constitution! Right, because we have to honor the constitution, the constitution is concrete and cannot be infringed or changed at all, despite the 2nd amendment applying to a militia more than a random citizen. Close the door behind you...
I don't give a good-god-damn about "this" constitution, the one that says I have freedom of speech yet lists several exemptions because supreme court judges and congress are the gods of the constitution.
I couldn't care less if we throw out the whole constitution, the unlawful arrests, cruel and unusual punishment, coercion of false confessions or testimony, throw it all out. It's a piece of paper and that's been proven time and time again as congress and government infringe upon most every possible amendment there is now.
Close the door behind you...
I'm ok with it, no paper should have dominion over my life and the lives of its citizens if government can so openly break or bend the rules to its own advantage. If we're stepping on all these god-given sacred rules and laws under the constitution why not do the same for the second amendment? Close the door behind you.
It's back to that special exemption; hold prisoners without trials, spy on citizens without warrants, search a citizen without probable cause, arrest a citizen for expressing themselves, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MAN, YOU CAN'T TAKE AWAY MY GUNS, IT'S IN THE CONSTITUTION!!!
Well these terrorists aren't American so the rules don't apply, I can spy on you because it's in the interest of national security, I can search you because we have a zero-tolerance policy, I can arrest you because you are creating a disturbance and this is a "quiet zone", BUT DEAR GOD I CAN'T TAKE AWAY YOUR GUN, BECAUSE THE CONSTITUTION SAYS SO.
Lets do anything we want,interpret anyway we want with the constitution that benefits but remember to close the doors behind you.
If we're throwing it out, throw it all out. We got Bin Laden by ignoring the constitution, we expelled Westboro Baptist Church about 8 football fields from any high profile funerals and less people spend their nights in jail for possessing marijuana in Colorado and Washington.
Now close the door behind you...
The problem that I see now is that we argue that eliminating guns will just ensure the bad guys have guns, but just looking at England's 1997 law banning most all guns procedurally to now, they're down to 35 deaths, we're at 30,000. With a population at 20% of our own thats unfair though, applying that 20% difference to our gun deaths would give us 6000 deaths with guns to England's 35 without guns.
But it's in the constitution so we have to stand behind it, because a school shooting is a worthy sacrifice every now and again. Mental health screenings and waiting periods would only stop those whom were totally insane during both.
Dilemma 1. Waiting period.
How hard is it for someone whom already has a methodical plan to go on a mass murder rampage to wait a few extra days to get those guns?
Dilemma 2. Psych evaluation
There's cartoon crazy, then theres mentally unstable. Oh yeah, you will catch the visibly crazy ones, but how do you catch those people who know that their performance in that evaluation will decide whether or not they get the gun?
Are these methodical killers going to honestly spill the beans on their master plan because a psychiatrist asked them?
"Aww man, you got me! I was totally going to shoot up that bed bath and beyond next week, can I have my gun now?"
Close the door behind you.
Sacrifice has been the penultimate excuse for skirting the constitution before. Its a cesspool of new-age proverbs mixing with old;
"fight them over there so they don't come here"
"We need to frisk old people and children because how else will we catch the bombers if we can't frisk them too?"
"This bank is too big to fail and too big to prosecute we have to bail them out or we're all screwed"
Sacrifice for safety and freedom, because of a strong visual example burned in our heads, 9/11 and the economic collapse in 08. We witnessed and experienced the changes of both these moments first hand. Lost jobs, lost lives, powerful images of both moments stained in our memories of the past decade.
What we don't see is the murder on the street corner, the shot daughter in her bedroom, the suicides and accidents. It's not a shared experience, we may have seen one happen or known someone whom died because of guns but its not shared across the country.
Because the country doesn't see the 30,000 people a year die collectively we throw it out as just another statistic. We hold the 9/11 attacks in our head forever, but we have 30 times that amount die each year behind the headlines and CNN reports and we sit idly by.
I think it's worth it to save 30,000 lives a year to ban guns in the same way that its abundantly clear to the TSA that its worth 3000 lives a year to frisk old ladys and ban liquids over 3 ounces.
Some of us feel safe with our guns so let me keep mine and close the door behind you.
Some of us want a gun at some point so let me buy mine and close the door behind you.
Some of us value the constitution so let me honor just this one part and close the door behind you.
I personally am ok with buying a bbgun to shoot cans.
Ban the guns and close the door behind you.
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