If you are anywhere near my age you remember the cold war. Russia was the ultimate communist, godless enemy, and though I didn't really understand those concepts at the time, I knew enough that they were dangerous, and to be feared. We were indoctrinated with this belief from all directions. Fast forward to today where I reside in academia and work with students from all over the globe, Russia included. I now understand the context of the propaganda that bombarded us and how ridiculous it all was.
The arms race seems ridiculous to me, a pacifist, because in the end we were left with "Mutual Assured Destruction" (MAD) or the guarantee that any nuclear conflict would basically destroy life as we know it. So it was all a waste. I felt this way, until I watched the public broadcasting documentary on Ronald Reagan when I finally got it. I'm not even sure if the real motive was implicitly stated. Ronald Reagan and the rest of his administration were not stupid, and they never had any intention of using the weapons they were creating. That was not the real point of the arms race, Ronald's real goal was: to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
And it worked.
The oft quoted statistic this past week has been 310 million guns for 350 million citizens. That's roughly 1 gun for every 1.2 people. If you factor in ammunition, then there are enough weapons in this country to kill every man, woman, and child many times over. We have a phrase for that. (See previous paragraph).
Ronald Reagan knew that the arms race was futile, that you can only stockpile so many weapons before there will never be a winner; everyone will lose. There are so many logical and philosphical arguments against gun ownership that I get dizzy just thinking about it, and I get excited every time I think of a new one, but, as I think lots of anti gun people have experienced this week , it is tiresome and, like stockpiling an increasing stack of weapons, futile. I will not bother to offer any more because I think they've all been said. I'm only writing this post because I think I might have a new point of view to offer.
I hate guns. They are stupid, pointless, instruments of evil that are the redundant excuse for their own existence.
WE HAVE TOO MANY GUNS.
So I bet you expect me to start campaigning for renewal of the assault weapons ban, and tighter, stricter regulation? I admit I started out this week screaming for all of those things. I believe we need to tighten and standardize existing regulation, and clean up private sale and gun show loopholes, but I think we should leave gun laws alone.
I still think we need to get rid of them, the more the better, but after wasting my breath for a week blustering at gun advocates who's mind I was never gonna change, I realized that nothing will change until the hearts and minds of American's change. So for now I will not actively support any new gun restriction, to give a chance for a volunteer disarmament movement to take hold.
You may argue that if hearts and minds are changed, the guns become irrelevant, that they might as well be flower pots if the will to use them is no longer there. But in the mean time, the weapons which commit ALL crime started out as the legal purchase of a responsible citizen, and we need to close that channel.
We need gun buybacks, and gun safes, and gun insurance, but most of all we need the gun industry to voluntarily disarm. It has already happened. Several retailers have ceased sales. Cerberus, a major private equity firm that owns a large portion of gun manufacturers, including Bushmaster, is getting out of the gun business. But we can take it one step further: gun owners, if you own more than two guns, I challenge you, as a sign of good faith and community, to give up just one of your guns. Obviously it would be counter productive to sell them, but I'm sure the local police department, or gun range has many other alternatives.
But don't expect me to cry if they do renew the assault weapons ban, if only temporarily.
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