Gun Control - A Not So Modest Proposal

This post will no doubt annoy firearms aficionados - I don’t much care.  In the last 2 weeks, the United States has experienced 2 mass shooting events that resulted in multiple deaths each - one approaching 10, and another over 20 dead.  

Uvalde, TX - a community of 13,000 souls spends 40% of its annual budget on policing.  It has a 10 person SWAT team … heavily armed and armoured … in a town of 13,000 people.  Sit with that for a moment.  In what universe did you ever expect a town that size to need a SWAT team, much less to spend $4M of a $10M total budget on policing?  A SWAT team that apparent spent its time keeping parents from entering the building while their children were being murdered by a man with an AR-15 … in a state which allows civilian carry without license, training, or well … pretty much any restrictions. 

The Hits Keep Coming

Yesterday, a man picked up a gun and killed 18 students in an elementary school in Texas. 

This morning a candidate for the leadership of the CPC promised to burn Canada’s gun control laws. 

Wow - talk about not reading the room - at all. Possibly the worst hot take to publish the day after yet another mass shooting takes place in the United States.  

Oddly, I do agree with the Canadian firearms lobby on one thing:  The regulatory framework around firearms is a shambles - decades of fiddling and tweaking has resulted in a mess of seemingly arbitrary rules - banning some firearms and allowing others that are seemingly very similar in function and capability. 

I don’t think the gun lobby would particularly like my approach though - because as far as I’m concerned, pretty much anything that isn’t a single shot firearm should be banned outright, and after that we can talk about what is allowed in terms of ammunition sizes. 

However, I don’t particularly want to argue about the particulars of firearms regulation today.  I’ve written other posts on the subject in the past. Today’s subject is about the culture associated with firearms.