Yes, and no.
To change the people factor you would require massive re-education which is impossible because, as we both know, normal education across the world is a rarity, so the software can't be fixed. Much human software is fatally flawed from the first moments it exists, so no later fixing's going to work.
That leaves only the hardware, and the govt. could start by finding its testicles - assuming they have not atrophied beyond repair - and instantly ban the production of all small arms that a person might care to carry concealed in his waistband. It could restrict the sales of so-called sporting rifles to farmers and authorised rangers and ensure that anyone found owning a military weapon goes down for a considerable period. Sport shooting, as in the killing for "fun" of animals by a civilian with a blood lust and ineffectual penis is a horrible comment on the state of mind and being of such a person. Of such a vast group of them, in fact.
The arms business makes enough money selling to political and radical factions across the globe. Without its benign interference the weapons in those benighted territories would be no better than copies of copies of old Russian guns hand-made in Afghanistan.
Of course the criminals will ponder any gun amnesty and some will surrender and some not. If no new supply can be bought off the shelf, all the better; that illegal supplies will continue is not in question, but hey, the penalties can be made to match the crime, and buying illegally will be more difficult than doing so by mail order, in a mall or at a county fair.
Mr T wants to build walls: he can start with penitentiary ones first, helping both the building trades and the long-term employment figures in one magnificent gesture. Even the farmers would be happy with all those state-funded mouths to feed!
If you remove gun lobby money from politics, you can bet that governments of all stripes will quickly come to their senses on the matter of guns. It already gives them hassle enough every time some other moron goes nuts in the heat of either the moment or the weather. They don't need this crap, but they do grovel for the cash.
I always hate the disagree with a friend, but in this case, Rob, I can’t avoid it. I’ve been out most of the day, so I’m a bit late, but. . .
First of all, I agree that what nowadays passes for education is a black pit. Of course, to say something like that you first have to specify what you mean by “education.” If a person working to become, say, an MD is being educated, the education is taking place peripherally. He, along with his engineering, banking, and business counterparts, is being “trained.” “Education” is something beyond training. There’s training and there’s brainwashing, but there’s damned little educating going on in our schools nowadays. I keep hoping education will creep back into our schools and universities, but I keep reading more and more stuff by “educated” people who don’t know the difference between the verbs “to lie” and “to lay,” and who think the expression “begs the question” means to ask a question more emphatically. I think that eventually this too shall pass away, but it ain’t gonna happen in my lifetime.
As far as the hardware is concerned, there’s that old saw: “When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.” And we’ve demonstrated that point over and over and over again with “gun free zones,” say, for instance, the 2013 massacre of 32 at Virginia Tech, to name just one particularly egregious example out of dozens. Here’s a paragraph from a letter I recently had published in the local paper:
“When this subject comes up my mind always flashes on the 2013 massacre at Virginia Tech. Livlu Librescu was a holocaust survivor and engineering professor who held the door of his Virginia Tech classroom against Seung-Hui Cho, the student who murdered 32 people that day. All but one of Livlu’s students escaped through another door, but Cho broke through and Livlu and one of his students were murdered. And I always think: What if the professor had been armed? He could have ended the slaughter right there at the door. But Livlu couldn’t be armed because Virginia Tech was a “gun free zone” (except for the gun Cho used to murder his classmates and teachers).”
The 2011 massacre of 91 in Norway also comes to mind. All of the terrible slaughters have been in gun free zones or their equivalent.
In any case, there’s no way guns are going to be prohibited or confiscated in the U.S., and that fact has nothing to do with either Mr. T or what you imagine is a “gun lobby.” Obama kept talking about things like that and if you check the figures (I could go dig out one of Bart’s charts, but I don’t have time to bother) you’ll find that Obama was the most successful gun salesman the U.S. has ever seen. People rushed out to guy guns before the man could cause a problem. The hardware simply isn’t going away. Even if guns were outlawed, outlaws would have guns, just as they have in countries that ban guns. But even if it were possible to eliminate guns entirely from the world, you’d see the kind of increase in knife attacks London has seen recently, and you’d see people driving trucks and cars into crowds, as has been the case in several countries.
The problem is with the people. I suspect that somewhere down the road there’ll be a serious revolt against the kind of behavior people are displaying at the moment, just as there was a gradual revolt against the outrages of Elizabethan England, ending in the recently departed puckered lips of Victorianism. Excesses come and go. Let’s pray that this excess soon will pass away.
