Another shooting in the American media, the largest since 2007 and the third (?) in the last two months. The owner used two registered handguns.
While researching a possible move to Los Angeles, I saw that the murder rate was 480 in 2006. In Germany, a country with ten times the population of Los Angeles, there were 794 murders in 2005. In Austria, which is roughly the same size as Los Angeles, a friend who is a police invstigator told me the number was around 70 per year.
The friend and I recently talked in Vienna about how difficult it was to get a handgun there. In Germany and Austria owning handguns is illegal. He said that it could take years to get a gun in Austria because of the stiff penalties.
I simply cannot agree with the statement; “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” People in America kill people with guns. It’s that simple. An example;
I taught a class a few months ago where we were talking about crime in Berlin. Many of my students’ apartments had been broken into . One student, in a heat of passion, said that if she had known she was being robbed she would have “burst in there!”
Another student was shocked. “But what if he had a knife?”
It was a strange moment for me. As an American, I assume criminals have guns. We even have the saying in America; “Bringing a knife to a gunfight.” In the united states there are 235,000,000 guns in private hands. That statistic comes from a group identifying themselves as
Connecticut residents committed to the preservation of the Second Amendment and the right of self-defense.
In his enlightening book, On Killing, Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman posits that human beings have a natural instinct against killing other human beings. This has been documented from the time of the romans, where soldiers were repeatedly trained to stab (fatal) with their swords, rather than to slash (usually non-fatal). Technology in warfare has centered around psychological distancing from the person you are supposed to kill. Technology, as well as training, make this possible. It’s an enlightening read if you have the chance.
I do not believe that human beings will ever stop killing each other, nor should they. Murder, like unemployment is a fact of human existence. It is in our interest to make killing people as difficult as humanely possible, and part of that is making handguns illegal. No one ever used them for hunting who wasn’t proving the fact that you could. The fact that this man could go into an immigration center and shoot people with legal guns is a mar on every single american. It was tragic to read in the new york times that “It was the nation’s worst mass shooting since April 16, 2007.” That wasn’t even two years ago, and there have been many shootings since.
There are many social ills that contribute to these shootings. I do not claim to be able to understand them all. When you make handguns (as well as assault rifles in pared down form) legal and abundant, it only makes it easier for people to kill each other. Look at the murder rates in Europe. People still kill each other, they even have school shootings, but they do not have 17,000 citizens murdered a year in Germany. Even adjusted for population it’s nowhere close to America. We lose four times as many Americans to murder every year than we have lost in the entire iraq war. I’m sick of it.
