Quote Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer View Post
So yet another mass shooting. But it's not a time to talk about gun control yet again. Obviously, there is never a time to talk about gun control
I used to think like this, but I'm actually starting to come around to the other side. It's actually NOT the right time to talk about gun control.

There was an piece in the WP recently that explained the numbers behind gun deaths and the causes. Mass shootings are tragic, and terrifying, but they make up an incredibly small portion of the gun-related deaths in the US.

Some 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Another fifth or so are single homicides involving young men. Like, a guy shoots his wife's lover, a gang beef, a robbery gone bad. Things like that. The next largest group of similar gun-deaths are female victims of domestic violence. That group is pretty small and it's still far larger than the population of mass shooting victims.

The point of that piece was that the gun control measures being called for right now, wouldn't really do much to reduce the number of gun deaths in America.

At first, I thought, "so what". War machines have no place in the civilian theater. No one is really hurt if automatic weapons are banned. Preventing some gun deaths is better than preventing no gun deaths. So just pass the damn gun control measures!!

But like everything else, it costs money. Once you outlaw the guns, you automatically create a black market for them. Combating that requires more resources and training for law enforcement. It means more prosecutions, more incarcerations. Passing a law is easy, but enforcing a law costs money.

And anytime a gov't (or anyone really) spends limited resources, there is an opportunity cost. Spending resources to pass and enforce new legislation means that we have less resources to spend on something else.

So if resources are limited, we have to make choices. We could ban assault weapons, reducing the body counts for mass shootings. Or perhaps instead would could put our resources into outreach and support programs for suicidal adults. Or maybe we could pour more resources into curbing gang violence.

Is it possible that one of those other expenditures would reduce the overall body count from gun deaths more than an assault weapons ban? It certainly is.

We have to decide which type of gun deaths we want to spend our resources on. That decision takes cool-headed, clear-minded debate. You can't have that when you are in the midst of an extreme emotional reaction to one particular kind of gun death. So that means that the WORST time to have a debate about gun control is right after a mass shooting.

That being said, once the mass shooting outrage dies down, no one really seems interested in bringing up the debate at all. The last assault weapons ban went out 13 years ago. There has been plenty of non-emotional time to implement reforms. You can't blame stonewalling republicans, or the gun lobby either. Democrats had a royal flush in '08 and didn't do shit. Which just goes to show you that in the end, no one really has a vested interest in limiting guns in America. It's a concern dwarfed by healthcare, taxes, north korea, terrorism, civil rights, and a whole host of headline-grabbing government scandals.

If the aftermath of a shooting is the only time people are ever outraged about guns, well then their outrage isn't very sincere. And alot of this "we need gun control now" talk is really just thinly veiled liberal mudslinging with no real intention of bringing about reforms. It's just an opportunistic attack on conservatives