To have every person in America armed with any caliber weapon.

 That seems to be the mission statement of today’s NRA, and the more they stick to that position, the more desperate and out of touch they appear.

 I haven’t heard any advocate for gun control say anything about taking away all of the guns, and yet the NRA continues to take a stance as if that is exactly what is being proposed.

 People can keep their rifles and shotguns for hunting and target, and their pistols for home and personal protection. But if you need to own and shoot a weapon of war, join the military.

 The reality of the situation is that what most open-minded people are asking for is a reduction or elimination of the availability of battlefield weapons; those guns and accessories that are designed not for sport, but for the sole objective of killing and maiming as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.  Sportsman don’t need or want these weapons.

 Some people strongly object to this line of thinking.

“I’m not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.”

So strongly in fact, that these seem to be the last people who should be allowed to own a gun. (UPDATE: TIme (and legalities) seems to have tempered this man’s anger, as he’s edited his video to delete the above statement, but he makes reference to it here.)

 One of the many NRA arguments against more gun control is that there are already hundreds of gun control laws, and we just have to enforce them.  Well, the problem here is two-fold.  Number one, most laws designed to keep checks on guns being sold to the wrong individuals have been neutered by the lobbying of the NRA, essentially making them ineffectual, and number two, we shouldn’t have hundreds of laws, with each state regulating in their own way.  We should have a national set of laws that are universal for all states and all Americans.

 Jay Sterling Silver of the Christian Science Monitor sums up the arguments of those against gun control well:

..opposition to gun regulation on the basis that it won’t keep guns out of the hands of murderers or that mental health resources could be brought to bear in these cases reflects what is known in formal logic as the “red herring fallacy.” This is when one argument is used to deflect attention from what’s really at issue.

[…]

 The fact that a law won’t completely eradicate a particular harm is not an argument against its adoption.

This holds true for gun regulation. The point is that, as with all law designed to protect life and limb, tighter gun control laws will reduce the carnage. Even a modest measure banning, for example, the high-capacity ammunition magazines used in these atrocities would have saved many innocent lives.

The arguments that guns would still fall into the wrong hands, that death will be wrought by other means, and that those who pull the trigger often have mental health problems are a sleight of hand when offered to defeat tighter gun controls.

Their answer to all gun violence seems to be more guns, arguing for armed guards and teachers in schools, and everywhere else in society in order to keep us safe.  Just this week there was another school shooting, but without the high powered assault rifle and body count that often goes along with it.  Fortunately, teacher Ryan Heber was able to talk the shooter, a student, into surrendering.

This sort of contradicts Wayne La Pierre’s simplistic, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

I wonder if there had been armed staff at the Taft Union high school if the suspect would have survived. Certainly there may have been more than the one casualty. These school shooters are often students or adolescents, and someone’s child.  More lives taken is not the answer.

New gun laws may not be perfect at first, but surely this is an issue that we should err on the side of caution with, is it not?