Before we worry about banning guns…

While the media, politicians, and everyone else have been carrying on about gun violence and what to do about it, no one is mentioning the bigger problem that plagues society.  Yes, gun violence is a problem as over 11,000 homicides were committed with guns in 2013, but why is no one talking about the source of 33,000 deaths in the same year?

We are told that if you make guns illegal, taking them completely away from people, there would be no more murders with guns.  Of course, this is true.  If there are no guns, how can a person shoot anyone?  This same logic needs to be applied to the aforementioned even deadlier killer.

We need to ban automobiles.  How else can you guarantee that neither you nor any of your family or friends will die in an auto accident?  How can anyone argue in the negative to that?

What mCars vs Guns by Yearakes this problem even worse is that while the vast majority of gun homicides are intentional, the vast majority of automobile fatalities are unintentional.  That means you could be a killer without having any such intentions whatsoever.  There are cars and trucks all around you, so you don’t know when it’s going to happen.  They’re in your garages and driveways and speeding down your streets around your children.  Nearly everyone has at least one.

Is it too drastic of a position to advocate the elimination of cars?  Why not take other steps before going all the way to that?

Intermediate steps by the government have been tried and they have all failed.  There are safety features on cars.  We require people to be trained and licensed to drive.  We have minimum age limits on who can legally drive.  We have limits on speed and limits on how far you can go without stopping.  Instead of allowing the private sector to do it, the government even designs, builds, maintains, and manages the roads.  The police patrol the roads levying fines on the offenders who break their laws.  But despite all of this, we have a huge number of deaths every year.

If it makes sense to ban guns, then it has to make sense to ban the thing that causes three times the number of deaths.

4 comments

      • Assuming your response is sarcastic this is sadly the response by most people yet this is a serious issue that few people will challenge. Those who do know the consequences and suffer them as well.

        • Haha I was being sarcastic, using the same “logic” I used to call for banning cars.

          Getting people to break out of the status quo is the hardest thing to do. “That’s the way things are” is what people tend to accept even though the results are often unacceptable with huge amounts of room for improvement.

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