Sunday, December 16, 2012

USA and Gun Control

The recent shooting in Newtown, CT shook me to the core and this is the first time in my recent memory of mass shootings and deaths I was shaken, needless to say fatherhood has its side effects.

Anyways, as any other person living in the USA I spent my weekend on gun control laws and the NRA and so on. Here is my take on the topic.

The NRA claim is that owning a gun is a constitutional right and it is intended to “have the ability to raise a private militia” in case the government decides to take over. In short one needs to own the gun to keep democracy in place. But wasn’t this statement made over 100 years ago when the government and the citizens had similar weapons. There were no missiles, invisible drones carrying missiles, hangars of F-16, F-18 and F-22’s and not to mention the nuclear warheads. Do we really believe that a citizen militia does stand a chance against the mighty armies armed to the teeth with way more sophisticated technology in terms of communications and weapons? In short if Obama decides to become the dictator and the American military decides to cooperate with him then I doubt if the free floating guns have any chance. 

That said, I am all for owning a gun and gun rights. For better or worse human beings in general are tending to be more private and believe in having their own space (big and wide) and its tough to be dependent on the 911 call to help always. As they analyze in the book “Freakonomics”, a gun changes the equation, it will make the contender likely to loose a fight more likely to win the fight. As much as I love to believe, we do not live in a very civilized world. So, I believe one should have the right to own a gun for self protection. The other reason to own a gun is for sport (target shooting) and (as much as I dislike it) hunting.

While reading the article on Mother Jones website, it occurred to me that most of the mass gun shootings are carried out by semi automatic pistols or handguns. The so called assault rifles contribute to less than half of the shootings. So, if the law makers do not want to pick up the battle and want to ban all the assault rifles and want to face an opposition from the NRA and its likes, here is my advice, just focus on banning all the large capacity magazines. Set the max limit to 8 or 10, let the rifle lovers have their rifles, For it is my understanding that for both the scenarios I mentioned one would not need a 30-40 bullet magazine. To be more effective the ban should be retroactive and make an effort to eliminate these methodically.