Why?

From Canada:

It would seem that Canadian opinion on gun control and registration is divided quite clearly between city and country.

Perhaps the solution lies in the old western movies we used to watch as kids.

It was very common for the sheriff to have a rule that when the cowboys came to town, they had to leave their guns at the sheriff’s office.

I wonder if some form of that idea would not provide a mutually acceptable solution today? Perhaps municipalities could have the option of requiring that guns be registered and stored at police stations in town while rural folk would be free to keep them in their homes?

The feds would still run the registry which they will be doing for handguns anyway. Municipalities could opt in or out depending on the wishes of the majority of their citizens.

DAVID CADOGAN

I’m all for finding mutually acceptable compromises on divisive issues but this just doesn’t make sense to me. Given that this is Canada I’ll just ignore the fact that the government doesn’t guarantee it’s citizens it won’t infringe upon this inalienable right.

The only rational reason I can think of for demanding people turn over their guns as they enter town is because of some mistaken belief that it will make people safer. So, apparently Cadogan believes people that would commit criminal acts or have careless accidents with those firearms are going to obey the law to turn their gun over to local law enforcement as they enter the city limits. If they believe a law requiring they leave their guns at the city limits will stop criminals from using guns when they commit crimes they why don’t the laws against the criminal acts prevent the acts from being committed to begin with? It’s already illegal but somehow making it “more illegal” changes things in their minds. I can only attribute this type of belief to some sort of mental problem.

Don’t think for a minute that that Cadogan is an anomaly. Remember what Bill Clinton said:

I’m not at all sure that even a callous, irresponsible drug dealer with a 6-year-old in the house wouldn’t leave a child trigger lock on a stolen gun.

If it’s not a mental problem then they must have some other motivation. What is that motivation? Do they believe the average person is so stupid to not notice what they are proposing is nonsensical? I think this might have been the case 20 or more years ago. Communication was not nearly as good and the Internet has made a dramatic improvement in the ability to expose stupidity and maliciousness. These days people like Cadogan, mikeb302000, Sarah Ibarruri (and here), and Maria Cramer are easily and quickly shown to be fools. So after they have been slapped down dozens or even a hundred times why do they keep trying the same type of foolishness?

There is a plausible explanation for politicians who advocate firearms restrictions. It increases their power and/or decreases the risks if they decide to go on a genocidal rampage.

But why do rather ordinary people do this? I keep coming back to mental problems.

Update: elmo_iscariot asks essentially the same question and proposes an answer.

Update2: Don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out why. In the big scheme of things it’s not really that important. As I have said before it’s just important that we defeat them.

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9 thoughts on “Why?

  1. Wouldn’t statistics suggest that we are safer in the countryside (where all the scary guns are) than we are in the city (where infringment is the norm)?

    I am rarely edgy in rural America. I am rarely settled in the city….

    I have it! Register the cities!! It is THEIR fault. B-)

  2. “…Perhaps the solution lies in the old western movies we used to watch as kids.

    It was very common for the sheriff to have a rule that when the cowboys came to town, they had to leave their guns at the sheriff’s office…”

    There are always a few little facts about this kind of thing left unmentioned in those old Westerns – and in the modern-day versions of them, as well – about this “leave your guns at home or the town limits” thing:

    a) The townspeople/residents did not give up their guns – and townfolk back then, especially in Western towns, were generally pretty well armed. Where this sort of rule was applied at all, it applied to newcomers/visitors, and was an attempt to stem some of the possible violence in conflicts between townspeople and “outsiders” – and it wasn’t tried nearly as often as Hollywood would have you believe, anyway.

    b) It wasn’t an especially effective tactic against violent behavior, with or without the use of guns, for a variety of reasons, chief among which were: guns were just as concealable then as they are now, if not more so; it was easy enough to get into town some other way than where the law officers could see you; criminals (then as now) paid little or no attention to such attempts to disarm them.

    Such early attempts at “gun control” were mostly pretty futile, and seem to have led to even greater violent confrontations where they took place.

  3. Not to mention that Bowie Knives and other such fighting and utility blades did such a wonderfull job of slicing people up in altercation, similar to today’s Gangland Machette assassinations.

    And of course the old West as a whole likely didn’t have homicides at the rate of most of our modern cities.

    That’s an ugly elephant in the room for the antis.

  4. Heh.. “Dwellers”

    Joe, you hit it – – I was trying to be “nice”… snicker…

    Denizens? Inmates? Captives?

  5. “And of course the old West as a whole likely didn’t have homicides at the rate of most of our modern cities.”

    Yeah, because an armed society is a polite society, right? Unfortunately, it’s not true. The old West had a much higher homicide rate than we have now. Kevin Mullen has done extensive studies of homicides in San Francisco from 1849 to present time. Others have also studied various aspects of crime and the Old West.

    Here’s a fact from here: http://books.google.com/books?id=antycYtRXOUC&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=%22homicide+rate%22+%22San+Francisco%22+1850&source=bl&ots=fmA-IK5r8t&sig=V422jxds88q87DnlqL4ZS1dsq8A&hl=en&ei=oZQSS4SEBpTiswOhqcjrCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CAsQ6AEwAQ

    “Between September 1850 and September 1851, the homicide rate in the city of Los Angeles and its suburbs spiked off the graph at 1240 per 100,000, which remains the all-time high homicide rate in the annuls of American murder.”

  6. Places like Los Angeles and San Francisco aren’t really considered the Old West; they were just eastern cultures on the west coast, and were completely different from the other western states. The old west territories and states actually had a lower homicide rate than either California or the eastern cities. Most shootings were between criminals, or citizens shooting criminals, and were nothing like the gun battles shown in movies and on TV.

  7. Los Angeles had a population of less than 5,000 in 1850 and half of the population was Indian. Here’s a history of the LAPD in the 1800s, which is really interesting: http://www.lapdonline.org/history_of_the_lapd/content_basic_view/1107

    San Francisco had a huge population compared to Los Angeles, and that population came from all over the world because of the discovery of gold.

    How are you defining “criminal”? With few laws on the books, many things that are criminal today (like prostitution) were not in the mid-19th Century.

    Some of the more famous “Old West” criminals, like Butch Cassidy, actually operated closer to 1900 than 1850 and would have been hampered by organized police departments, etc. To me, the era of the “Wild West” would have been before organized law enforcement — like Los Angeles in the link above.

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