Friday, February 09, 2007

A Gun, A Mom, and a Murder

Gun-banners always decry the availability of guns. They don’t explain how the vast majority of gun owners never commit a crime with their guns—tools really. (Shane quote redux, “A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.”).

As Shane said, it all depends on the user. I wonder what the gun-banners say about a mother who gives her teenage a gun so he can extract revenge for a fight he lost. Her son shot the person who won the fight and he died in the hospital.

How do you stop gun violence when a person’s mother encourages it? You can’t take away guns because you can’t un-invent them or make them impossible for criminals to get (look at England, which has a rising rate of gun violence despite banning all handguns). The mother could also give her son a baseball bat just as easily.

The only thing you can do is stand in amazement at the depravity of someone who encourages and enables a murder and make sure her and her son never walk free again.

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