BAD GUYS ALL HAVE GUNS

One of the most often heard arguments in defense of gun ownership is “Bad Guys All Have Guns". Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas, for example, seems to believe if everyone has guns we will be safest. If the teachers had guns, they could have blown the shooters head off; thus, saved the children. How stupid is this forth term congressional representative? How stupid are the Texans that voted for him four times?

The belief expressed by Gohmert and held by many private individuals in respect to personal safety seems intuitive. It is the learned American cultural version of the “fight or flight” stress response and is directly related to social contamination by gun ownership. Is it too late to rectify the situation? Are there too many guns to control them? What happens next in our society? The distorted belief, innate or not, extends up to people like John McCain, who believe the more guns we have as a nation the safer we will be. Remember the Cold War mentality; after we unequivocally had more guns then we had to have bigger and bigger guns until we ended up atomic bombs salted around the world.  We have just seen the result of the McCain approach in a couple of classrooms in Connecticut; an assault rifle and two pistols. If everyone has bigger guns, good people and bad people, big people and little people, sane people and crazy people, we will be safe. Will we be safer if we have more and bigger guns than the next person? As they say on the streets, “get real”.

I am not a psychiatrist, but if I were to design a sanity test for gun ownership the first question would be do you feel safest when you have a gun? If the subject answered yes, it would prove he or she is not a target shooter or a hunter—no gun permit should be issued.