It doesn’t matter to me why a “crazed” or “evil” (take your pick) individual walked into an immigration services center in Binghamton, New York and shot and killed 14 people seemingly at random. Just like it doesn’t matter to me why the kids at Columbine wanted to kill their whole school, or the Virginia Tech shooter wanted to to shoot as many of his fellow students and faculty members as he could before dying, or why the man in Alabama who killed 11 people thought it was a good idea to go on a revenge rampage. Or why anyone decides to take a gun and shoot a spouse, girlfriend or themselves. Discerning the motivations or reasons why people kill each other with firearms is, in the end, a fruitless endeavor. For this is the society we’ve chosen.
We’ve chosen to live in a society where firearms, both the legal and illegal varieties, are ubiquitous. We’ve chosen to allow a single issue special interest group to promote laws (and heavily fund the campaigns of politicians who support their agenda) that make it easier than ever for anyone to buy, carry and use firearms of all kinds, from small caliber concealable pistols to large caliber machine guns.
We’ve also chosen to live in a society where gun manufacturers benefit from legal loopholes in the limited gun control laws we do have on the books which enable a vast criminal underground black market in illegal guns to exist, a market which easily allows criminals and minors to acquire assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols and other firearms.
“Leaders in the [firearms] industry have long known that greater industry action to prevent illegal transactions is possible,” [Robert A. Ricker, a former chief lobbyist and executive director of the American Shooting Sports Council] said, particularly through a network of manufacturers’ representatives who stay in close touch with dealers. But industry officials have “resisted taking constructive voluntary action,” he said, and have “sought to silence others within the industry.”
This has resulted in a “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach,” Mr. Ricker said, and encouraged “a culture of evasion of firearms laws and regulations.”
We’ve chosen to live in a society where murderous gangs of foreign and domestic drug dealers can obtain almost any weapon made in America by using straw purchasers to go to unregulated gun shows to buy these weapons and the ammunition needed to equip their private armies.
Because Mexican gun laws are so restrictive and very few Mexican citizens are allowed to own or sell guns, the traffickers purchase most of their weapons in the U.S. where the laws are more lenient and federal firearms agents are stretched woefully thin. (Several sources have said that along the entire 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexican border, there are fewer than 100 federal firearms agents currently working weapons smuggling cases.)
On too many occasions, Mexican police have been simply out-gunned and overrun by the well-armed drug gangs. Just last week, the police chief in Juarez, Mexico, resigned after the drug traffickers began to make good on their threat to methodically kill his officers one by one if he didn’t quit.
Federal, state and local public officials, as well as soldiers and journalists, are also targeted by the traffickers as they fight to defend and spread their narcotics operations. Innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire.
We’ve chosen to live in a society which has turned a blind eye to the fact that our nation leads the developed world in homicides, suicides and other deaths caused by firearms, as well as non-fatal gun injuries, by a large margin. Even nations racked by poverty and criminal gangs such as Brazil and Mexico have a lower per capita rate of deaths caused by firearms than our nation.
And we’ve chosen to live in a society which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to sue gun manufacturers for the deaths and misery their “business practices” and their “products” have caused.
WASHINGTON — New York City’s nine-year lawsuit accusing gun makers of flooding illicit markets with their firearms came to an end on Monday, when the United States Supreme Court refused to consider a lower court’s dismissal of the case. […]
The appeals court had overturned a decision by Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, who ruled in 2005 that the suit could proceed despite protests by gun makers like Beretta U.S.A., Browning Arms, Colt Manufacturing, Glock and Smith & Wesson. The gun companies had complained that a federal law passed just two months earlier shielded them from such suits.
The law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, bans most suits against the firearms industry. A narrow exception allows suits when a gun maker or dealer has knowingly violated state or federal statutes in sales and marketing practices — by knowingly selling a weapon to someone who fails a criminal background check, for example.
This is the society we’ve chosen. Don’t ask why this wave of mass killings by firearms continues in our country. Don’t ask why people can acquire a gun and kill you, your family or themselves with it easier than they can obtain a driver’s license. It doesn’t really matter why. There will always be people in any society whose hatred or anger or sociopathic personality traits or just the evil which lurks in everyone’s soul will lead them to commit violence against others and themselves. So don’t ask why they do it.
What you should be asking is why we have chosen to live in a society which makes it so easy for these people to acquire deadly firearms with which to commit violence, mayhem and murder? Because, that is the only question that really matters.
