Letters to the Editor
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Hell's Liberal Argument Illogical
Hell's Liberal your argument is completely illogical. You are transposing cause and effect. Urban areas typically have higher crime so they have more of an interest in curbing it through gun control laws. They do not have high crime because of gun control laws.
Also, I have lived all over New York for 15 years and have never ever heard a gun shot. Don't know where your staying when you visit New York.
Finally, the crime rate in New York has consistently dropped year after year to the lowest levels since the 60s. This is in part due to the tougher gun control laws being enforced. I would be careful entering New York with any of your easily obtained Florida guns, you could spend the next 3 years in jail.
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Not limited to the Right
I've heard similar rhetoric from my own Left, and from "libert"arians, on the subject of the Stupid Drugs Laws. Rather than the excellent and reasonable case for the elimination of most, and weakening of all, of the Stupid Drugs Laws, a simple recourse to "The laws aren't working, so repeal them," is far from uncommon.
(It's a particularly bad argument in this case because, to a large extent, they _have_ worked: the only drugs to which I and my upper-middle-class professional friends seem to have easy (say, the ease for a canonical college student) and safe (as in "not liable to lose your home") access are alcohol, caffeine, and various prescriptions that for the most part aren't much fun. As we, a mostly white, higher-income, group, are the people politicians mostly like* and care about, and they don't want us having fun in particular ways, and we've stopped, that's success.
*They _love_ the rich, but there aren't enough of them to be a voting bloc before the election, though afterward.... As to the poor, politicians seem to have the same attitude that that Don had in "The Godfather": "They're animals; let them lose their souls," with the added bonus that making entire neighbourhoods arrestable-at-will is great for the police and those running them.
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Gun Registration is Redundant
It's not really necessary to call for people to register their guns. Anything purchased since about 2001 is being tracked by Your Government In Action. Every purchase from a gun store, every acquisition of ammunition, every visit to a shooting range, every hunting license, every purchase of "Guns & Ammo" or the NRA's rag. It's the "Total Information Access" -- er, "Terrorist Information" something -- program.
De-funded and shut down by Congress, it's apparently still up and running within the "black" bowels of the NSA.
Congress, under the Republicans, may make it illegal to collect gun purchase information, or to keep the information more than 1 business day - but the spy shop need not pay any attention to that.
Believe me - the government already knows if you have guns.
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Everybody seems to have flawed arguments here
And I'm sure mine is not much better, but for what it's worth, I am reposting what I posted recently about this same issue just a few days ago... stay tuned!
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Nothing can be done about guns?
I keep hearing that because of Amendment 2, we can't do anything about guns. Arguments have already been put forward here about the ambiguity of that amendment, to which I would add that today's weapons could not be imagined by the musket-toting framers. But compare 'gun rights' to how we treat free-speech. Though it is a constitutionally guaranteed right, we have volumes of law regulating speech, from the classic "Fire!" in a theater to mail fraud, product labeling rules, copyright law, libel, slander, FCC censorship, hate speech, etc. As a society, why are we more willing to regulate speech than guns?
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Guns are NOT the problem
And no, I am not a gun owner or a memeber of the NRA. In the 1960's, you could buy fully assembled, fully automatic weapons (read: machine guns) and their required ammunition right out of the Sears catalog by mail, no background check, no ID check to verify age or anything. And yet, we didn't have the kinds of mass killings and gang violence that we have now, with all our regulations, laws, background checks, bans on assault weapons, etc. Yes, there was that man who went up the clock tower and committed a mass murder, but that was beyond even an anomaly back then. The fact of the matter is that it's not the guns causing these problems. It's the general erosion of the spirit that allows people to become so heinous. My heart goes out to the families and friends of those poor, innocent victims of the VA Tech tragedy, but eliminating guns won't cure the disease, it will only mask a symptom.
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Sol
Charles Whitman was a USMC trained sniper who also happened to have organic brain disease. It was not mental illnes per se, it was a tumor on his brain coupled with some dazzling sharpshooter skills. Pretty rare combination.
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RealName
Is that supposed to refute my argument somehow? I don't remember making any claims as to Whitman's state of mind, only that it happened and that it was exceedingly rare in a time when such awesome firepower was anyone's for the taking.
If that was purely for my edification, then I thank you for that, though I'll probably forget it in a day or two. ;-)
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Well I do know that in 1934
Machine guns were outlawed because so many people appeared to be using them willy nilly. Be that as it may, a full clip spray from an Ingram or Uzi isn't likely to hit more people in its 3 or 4 second burst than is any other random drive by. According to the FBI something like 85% of all shootouts are less than 7 yards and even then fewer than half of the shooters get hit, including trained agents. Seems that coupling a cool headed psychopathology with some training is the ingredient to mass murder. Anyway it's a moot point, aint no one gonna take the Americans guns away. It's just one of those things people are going to live with, like obesity and bad driving.
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Obsolete
Dear Tom Tomorrow,
You seemed to have turned a corner. At one point in your career you addressed vital issues that few were covering or dared to touch. Now you seem to be sleepwalking through your job: Draw some hilariously retro 1950's businesmen and housewives arguing for the conservative corporate estabblishment and -- Boom! -- There's your cartoon for the week. It never varies, you seem to repeat the same messages endlessly and you never show any signs of hope, just droll criticism for a hopeless future. I myself am a depressing cynic and you are bumming me out! But this isn't just about politics, it's about the corners that cartoonists back themselves into when they draw a comic that they are no longer interested in really making, were it not for the steady paycheck: Groening, Schulz, Davis, Breathed and now, so it would seem, Mr. Tomorrow. I realize that you probably make substantially less than any of those dudes, but the result is no more readable.