...even with those who have the strange American fixation on the right to own military-style firearms. They don’t have a reason for this fixation—no reason can be found.
There’s no argument for it—such weapons are useless in sport, except for the sport of using them; they play no role in hunting, or not hunting anything except helpless people; and they protect no one from a tyrannical government, since the tyrannical government, if it would ever come to that, is hardly in need of small-arms fire to assert its will.
Absent an argument for it, they merely have a fixation about it, but it remains practically religious in its intensity.
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
1 comment:
There is a reason for this fixation: guns are a gun nut's toys. Nothing makes a child angrier than taking away their toys.
Because there is no real justification for this fascination gun nuts substitute volume for reason. To get their way they scream louder and threaten people with their guns. They make up statistics and suppress real studies of gun violence because they know they can't win with facts.
Australia showed that a society can disarm itself and reduce the number of mass shootings, with the added bonus of reducing gun suicides as well.
England showed that your average street cop doesn't even need guns (SWAT teams do, of course), with the added bonus of far fewer killings of civilians by cops and far fewer police deaths because so few civilians have guns.
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