Sax and Violins ...

Another gun control debate popped up on a site that I frequent, and I decided not to engage, save for a passing reference to crazy people running amok. 

I think I'll amplify that here, though. I'm not the first to address this aspect of it, won't be the last, but my take on it ...

Guns are an effect, not the cause. Yes, undoubtedly if all boomware just ... went away tomorrow, there would be a lot fewer of us slaughtered, in war, or on the streets and in the bedrooms, no question. 

We are a violent species, and in America, more so than most "civilized" nations. Violence is the first tool a lot of us reach for when a problem arises. If we are ever to get past our primal natures and pointed teeth, we have to deal with who and what we are. Tribal, violent, not far from the killer apes, driven by prehistoric urges and old, old hardwiring. There's no quick fix for this.

We kill each other because that is our nature. Guns are more efficient tools for doing what we do.

Take away guns, and I guarantee you that people will still kill each other. It will be harder, because offing somebody with a knife means you have be close enough to get blood on yourself, but killing won't stop until the urge to slay goes away, or somehow gets re-channeled. 

Take away a would-be killer's gun, you take his ability to do it wholesale with little training. If he really wants to do it, he has a plethora of weapons, from blades to automobiles to Molotov cocktails. To pressure cookers.

The site I mentioned is mostly full of liberals, many of whom with hearts that bleed even more than mine. (They think, some of them, that I am a jackbooted right wing thug.) 

During another discussion, somebody started a list of desert island movies–those you'd take along if you could pick a dozen. 

Some great movies among 'em, some less so, but I checked about a hundred of them at random, and you know what? Almost all of them are dripping with violence, and much of that killing violence, necessary to resolve the story. 

I heard Harlan Ellison give a talk once about the original Star Trek, back in the early seventies. How many of the episodes are resolved without violence? How many have no physical violence in them at all?

There are a handful of comedies or coming-0f-age or loves stories in the favorite movies lists in which somebody getting bashed, or shot, or threatened with either (or both) aren't part of them.

What does that say about liberals? What we find entertaining? From Zulu to Star Wars to Casablanca, people being bashed or shot are front and center.

Kind of like saying you love animals while you chow down on bacon-wrapped sirloin steak. Different kind of "love ..."

I'm not claiming any purity there, what I write features a lot of fisticuffs and firearms, I am not holding myself up as the example of anything  ... well, save somebody who's noticed that such is the way of things, and is hereby pointing it out ...