A letter to the editor in yesterday’s Indianapolis Star caught my eye.
State Sen. Robert Meeks, R-LaGrange, introduced an amendment to a House bill that aims to dismiss pending lawsuits against gun manufacturers such as the ones filed by the city of Gary.
An excellent move, IMHO. But not in the writer’s:
You’ve probably heard the National Rifle Association slogan, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
Scuse me? I wasn’t aware that that was an NRA slogan. In fact, I can’t even find it in a search of the NRA’s website:
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Like many slogans designed for propaganda, it is true
Uh-huh.
but doesn’t tell the whole story. While a gun all by itself has a difficult time killing somebody, it is also true that a person armed with a gun is much likelier to kill somebody than a person armed with a knife or a club. When was the last time you read a headline about a drive-by knifing?
Don’t know. When’s the last time you heard about someone getting knifed or bludgeoned or just kicked the shit out of in a bar? Seems like this sort of thing happens all the time, but maybe my experience is different from yours.
A gun allows impersonal, spur-of-the-moment killing that would never have been possible with more primitive weapons. People kill people, but guns make it much more likely that they will.
Sterling Wright
Merrillville
Sterling, I’d say you need to get a clue. Have you never heard of stilettos, garottes, and other non-gunpowder weapons that were designed for the sole purpose of impersonal, spur-of-the-moment (although I’d call it “window of opportunity”) killings? How do you think assassins have operated from time immemorial? Even in fiction, James Bond doesn’t use a gun all the time.
A guy with a gun, moreover, might or might not be more likely to use it to kill someone. In a concealed-carry state, though, he won’t know whether his opponent also has a gun or not until it’s far too late…and his opponent might be better with the weapon than he is. Or less drunk or stoned, which amounts to the same thing. I’m guessing that the odds are, in an atmosphere of doubt as to the other guy’s level of armament, it’s no more likely that a man with a gun and a load of Dutch courage is going to arbitrarily go root-toot-toot at the other guy than he would be to knife him or crack him over the head with a beer bottle. As Robert Heinlein famously put it, “An armed society is a polite society.” If you think (or even just suspect) that the other guy might be armed, discretion may well be the better part of valor.
Bottom line: Only a liberal can possibly think the way you do, Sterling. That’s because liberals don’t read history.
[UPDATE: I significantly rewrote my penultimate paragraph. Originally it did not come out the way I meant it to…]