Guns, Guns, Guns

I grew up (this is where I insert my bona fides) in North Central Idaho, where everybody had a gun or two or three.  My dad took me hunting (a futile act as I was blind as a bat and couldn't see anything to shoot at). I personally had a rifle and/or handgun in the house much of time time as a young man, but at some point in my mid-thirties I gave my last weapon away, and haven't had one since.

This morning over breakfast and USA Today I read a disturbing column written by Stefani Carter, a GOP state representative from Texas.  In a rather transparent attempt to show that the GOP is welcoming to women and particularly women of color, Representative Carter wrote that the good news is that black women are the fastest growing demographic in the fair state of Texas of those seeking a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

In short (according to Carter) black women in Texas are arming themselves because in 2009 in the United States nearly 2 1/2 times as many black women were killed as white women.  And, more than 90% of those women knew their assailant. Representative Carter goes on to say that, "Nationally, GOP women, 30 to 44 years old, and who live in rural areas, are the fastest-growing group of gun owners."

Stafani Carter belongs to that group of people who seem to believe that we all need to be armed all the time - that the world is a very dangerous place and the only way to make it safer is to pass laws that give you the right to shoot whomever you think might be a threat.

When I look at her arguments, particularly those surrounding women of color, I wonder at the outcome of arming everyone.  Since more than 90% of black women knew their assailant, it likely means that when armed, they'll be shooting their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. Hmmm.  That doesn't seem like a useful outcome.

Which brought me to the question of how many personal weapons are floating around in the US?  According to the Small Arms Survey, 89 out of every 100 persons in the United States is armed today.  We're packing around 270,000,000 weapons in this country.  The next most highly armed country in the world is Yemen with 55 guns per 100 people.  Following them is Switzerland and Finland, with about 45/100.  Our Canadian friends have about 31/100, and south of the border in Mexico, about 15 guns per 100 people.  In our old cold war enemy Russia, about 9 out of a hundred own a gun, while across the pond the good folks in England and Wales carry about 6 guns per 100 people.

Clearly, we're the most heavily armed population in the world.  Do we feel safer?  Apparently not.  We're more afraid than ever before, and the GOP and NRA want to make sure we have enough guns to protect ourselves.

Yesterday, Terrance Taylor walked into a New Jersey grocery store and shot two co-workers before killing himself.  I suppose that had his co-workers been armed at the time, they might have killed him first.  Assuming that they were at least as good a shots as the highly trained New York City police officers who accidentally wounded nine innocent bystanders while trying to take out one shooter, the the store clerks probably wouldn't have killed more than 10 or 20 other people.  Of course, if those 10 or 20 had also been armed...

See, the thing is that about 30,000 people in the United States die every year of gunshot wounds.  Will giving everyone a gun make that go up or down?

Personally, I don't want everybody to have a gun.  Human beings are not universally qualified to carry weapons.  I don't see it as a right, God-given or otherwise.  I think you need to prove you're qualified to carry, and must receive a psychological evaluation that somehow disproves that you're the kind of guy that wants to kill all his co-workers, or everybody he sees in the next 10 minutes, or a bunch of Sikhs because he mixed them up with a bunch of Muslims, or people that go to Batman movies.  Once your brains are cleared, then you should get some training on how to be responsible with a weapon.  Then you can carry.

Better yet, we should all receive some training on how we really don't need to be afraid of everyone that's different than we are.  The Earth is a planet of xenophobes - one characteristic we could do without.