Why gun control in its present form is a bad idea

I used to think years ago that if we just got rid of “assault rifles” that everyone would suddenly be safe.  What is the point of owning an assault rifle?  Want to shred bambi at 50 yards?  Want to kill a Czech hit squad storming your house?  A few months ago, I saw a graphic that really made me think.  Then another.

The first one had to do with numbers of deaths associated with gun types.  Yes, one of my right-wing gun nutjob facebook friends posted some pics and it really made me think.  I listen to CNN every day on the way in to work, and yes, “if it bleeds, it leads”.  But CNN and other news outlets cover gun violence for the same reason E! covers Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian – ratings.  An overwhelming number of people that contribute to CNN are angry over the violence, but they are short on solutions.  I don’t think many of those “left leaning” liberal media types are actually trying to take your gun.  In fact, if you listen, and tune out the bias you may have towards the “liberal left”, very, very few of them, if any, expect you to give up your guns.  They seem to be focused on mass shootings, and how to prevent them.

I’m here to tell them, and you (if you are a moderate), that gun violence will not lessen with an assault weapons ban.  Limiting the size of the clip (to include police???) is somewhat silly if you think about it.  It’s the same stupid logic for the 12 oz soda limit.  You will just have people buying two sodas.  Dumb.  Bad people bring more than one clip, and changing a clip could take all of a second.

So let’s look at the first graphic.

I believe this is before Newtown, but let’s be honest here.  Newtown did not have the perpetrator going through background checks.  He stole someone else’s gun (his mom’s), which is how a lot of this shit happens.

In the graphic, you see like 18 people killed with “assault weapons”.  I also think this was before Aurora, but the overall idea here is that there aren’t a massive amounts of these types of events every year, and banning them really isn’t going to do a whole lot of good. Why?  Alcohol was illegal during prohibition.  Demand was so great, that a black market opened up.  Meaning, go ahead an ban assault weapons, with the idea that you will lower that number of deaths.  All you end up doing is taking them from the legal, responsible gun owner with a gun safe and end up creating a black market where thousands of these guns can be purchased by the “bad guys”.  You don’t lessen danger – you just end up taking it from people who don’t plan on harming anyone.

In the second and third graphics (below), you start to see the nonsense of the verbiage of these assault weapons bans.

 

Years ago, I just thought these bans were to ban automatic weapons, like an M16 and Uzis.  However, the bans are now written to determine ‘pistol grip’ and the like.  They are the same goddamn weapons as the legal ones, but because it now has a pistol grip, it’s more deadly?  Stupid.  It’s now a semantics game which really isn’t going to many anyone safer.

So, how do we fix gun violence problems?  I fall back on my business school training, when you want to find problems in an organization, and use the best bang for the buck, you use a tool called a Pareto chart.  This more or less means that “80 percent of your problems are caused by 20 percent of the reasons”.  So, imagine you have 400 hard core gangbangers in this country who have killed many people each with their illegal guns.  THIS is where you start.  By removing this scum, you now have hit the genesis of the issues.  Many other of these scumbags get illegal weapons to protect themselves from the worse guys.  These people in turn may use these weapons to break into people’s houses, steal money for drugs, etc…which in turn drives the responsible homeowner to purchase guns LEGALLY.  Then, you have stupid newspapers publishing the names and addresses of everyone who LEGALLY owns guns, so bad guys then break into these houses when said LEGAL gun owner is at work and steal their LEGAL gun, thus then making it an ILLEGAL gun.

I’m sort of past the whole tyranny thing of 200 years ago.  If everyone had a shotgun and/or rifle, it’s more than enough for the government to reasonably ‘fear’ the citizens, if you will.  But people like me trust that our government doesn’t plan on rolling tanks down our streets.  I’m worried about the drug dealers the next block over.  I’m worried about my city of crackheads who may want to break in to steal shit for drugs. I’m worried about the serial rapists and murderers out there.  I have a constitutional right to protect my home.

So our government needs to protect us from the two classes of people I mentioned above.  These are the king scumbags who murder other scumbags, then you have the other scumbags who use guns in the commission of a crime.  How can our government protect us from these people?

I propose the following, in order to take back our country:

1) Random stop and frisk.  You can create random DUI checkpoints and make people breathe into a tube, but you can’t randomly stop people/cars to check for ILLEGAL weapons?  If a person has papers for them, no biggie.

2) More jails designed for the worst of the worst. Stiffer sentences.  If you are caught with an ILLEGAL gun, you get put away for 20 years.  If you use an ILLEGAL gun in the commission of a crime, like breaking into a house, holding up a liquor store, it’s LIFE IN PRISON.  These people I don’t think we have any use for, and when you get a few hundred of these guys off the streets, maybe word gets out and shit settles down.

3) Universal background checks.  You want to sell one of your guns to your neighbor?  Cool.  Then there shouldn’t be a problem with that neighbor having a background check, which may reveal his domestic violence background or felony from 12 years ago he never told you about.  ALL guns need to be in the hands of legal, law abiding citizens.  If you have been in prison, I’m sorry, you no longer have that Constitutional right.

Currently, people get out of prison early all the time because of overcrowding.  My ideas I have written before on here, but I wish to re-iterate.  I believe we need “demand-side” prisons which will do the following:

1) Institute state-wide “no questions asked” illegal gun turn in programs for a period of 6 months.  After that, it’s on like donkey kong and you go to jail for a very, very long time with an illegal gun.

2) Remove users of illegal guns and drug addicted people from our streets and put in these prisons.  Once the negative elements are removed, investment may come back into cities and cultures may begin to change for a generation of different people being raised in our most violent cities.

3) Institute random  “stop and frisk” programs in violent neighborhoods and stop cars randomly for ILLEGAL gun checks.  Send offenders to jail.  No bail.

4) Create factory prisons for offenders, which pay for themselves without taxpayer money. These prisoners will be sent to a central prison of a state which is like a factory/prison.  When you are there, you are producing goods so we can also compete with low wage earners of the likes of China.

5) A prisoner can be released after 5 or 10 years if he demonstrates a GED, outstanding behavior, proficiency with a trade, and completion of behavior classes.  The person will be released with a clean record and allowed to live in a halfway house until they secure work and can rent a place of their own.  This may now make them eligible to work in the factories which have now since re-opened in their newly cleaned cities.

6) During the time of removing these bad elements, the government will partner with private industry to bring back industry jobs to inner cities through tax incentives and job training programs through local high schools, so many of these kids can find jobs immediately after graduating high school.  We will bring jobs back from overseas by any means necessary to many of the worst areas, perhaps taxing those who outsource a lot of these jobs or placing tariffs on these overseas-produced goods.   These factories will be union-free in order to keep production costs down and in-line with our overseas competitors.

You have to wonder why these king scumbags need gun and get into this life?  This is not hug a thug here, but many of these individuals never had a real relationship with their fathers.  They grow up in poverty, and it appears to them at a very young age that there really is not a lot of opportunity to make a living when they grow up other than working in some form of criminal enterprise.  When these “worst of the worst” are removed from our streets, the idea is that factories can come in and partner with local high schools, providing the next generation of children coming up real jobs and livings that are available to them.  These factories can also provide those getting out of prison a means to earn an honest living rather than going back to gang type of life.  I think our cities are starving for these types of jobs, and our American citizens are tired of the violence and death in our cities.

Overall, the best way to fight gun violence is by cleaning up our cities and providing career opportunities for the next generation.  What they do with this opportunity is up to them, but if they can’t live by our rules, there is always a factory somewhere in the state where they can live in peace, away from us, at no cost to me as a taxpayer.