Anti-liberty/gun cracktivist’s
By Mike McDaniel
Some things, death and taxes among them, never change. In the same category are the specious arguments of anti-liberty/gun cracktivists. Whenever a horrific crime like a mass shooting occurs, they blame the gun and the Americans who would never commit such a crime.
They also have additional narratives they hope Americans can be tricked into believing, such as virtually every mass attack is carried out by white men, all of whom are domestic terrorist, racist, transphobic white supremacist, Ultra-MAGA, Nazi, haters determined to destroy “our democracy.”
One such cracktivist is apparently John Davenport:
Graphic: Fordham University Faculty Site. Public Domain.
Dr. Davenport tells us the idea of greater security for students and the public at large is a “fallacy,” and “would not make us much safer.” He should know. He’s a professor of peace and justice studies, which obviously makes him an expert about peace and justice and stuff.
Think about it for a minute. How much would it actually cost to put armed guards in every single store and restaurant, every 300 feet or so on beaches and at open air events, in every movie theater and every 200 feet at concerts, at every entrance to every building at any hospital, college, school, church, temple or mosque, at all streets junction where lots of traffic piles up – and so on?
Actually, he’s sort of right. In 2013 even the NRA was advocating armed guards in every school. The usual suspects were against that, and the idea eventually died because the costs were—and are—simply too high. The numbers aren’t exact, but there are more than 110,000 K-12 public and private schools in America. missiongraduatenm.org/number-of-schools-in-the-us/ Putting even one, full-time armed guard in each school is prohibitively expensive, and far more than one would be necessary.
Unfortunately, general trust is declining in America ‒ an effect of high inequality and other factors that is further exacerbated by gun violence. While Americans now spend more than $3 billion a year to turn their schools into fortresses, people in some of Iceland’s small towns still leave their doors unlocked, or even leave keys in their cars for neighbors to borrow and return as needed. High trust is correlated with happiness.
Talk about fallacies. A high-trust society does tend to be happier, but that’s not quite the point. Countries like Iceland are relatively safe because of the very nature of their societies, which tend to be homogenous. Their people are of a common culture, with common beliefs, beliefs that emphasize personal responsibility, kindness, a common language and history, cooperation and civic mindedness.
When such countries allow mass immigration of fractious cultures things quickly change for the worse. Gang rape is common in many European and Scandinavian nations, and hand grenade attacks are common in Sweden. That’s rather more destructive than the occasional shooting or car theft.
Yet the gun lobby, fueled by enormous cash flows from selling military-grade weapons to average people, will fill the media with howls of fury that someone was able to enter a building at Brown without passing through a massive security apparatus.
Compared to many other industries, gun industry profits are low. Davenport also misleads with the common “military-grade weapons” lie. The guns Democrats most hate—AR-15s–merely outwardly resemble actual, fully automatic, military assault rifles. There is no such thing as an “assault weapon,” and those look-alikes available to citizens are semi-automatic only, and fire intermediate, not high-powered cartridges.
No one is arguing for a “massive security apparatus” everywhere. But many sane Americans are suggesting schools like Brown ought to actually use the video systems and other security measures they have in place rather than reportedly turning them off to avoid photographing illegal aliens or domestic anarchists and terrorists.
In the United States, the only way we can really reverse this growing nightmare is to address the gun fixation in the American mind itself and work to break its stranglehold on the young male mind.
And the minds of women of all ages who, in recent years, have been buying guns at record levels.
As a country, we need to take on the gun lobby just as we beat Big Tobacco. What just happened at Brown University should never happen again.
It appears the professor is a bit light on the “justice” part. The right to keep and bear guns is a fundamental, unalienable right. Smoking isn’t. If it’s in the Constitution banning it is off the table. And if we want to deter and stop attacks, we need to ensure many willing citizens are armed in colleges and everywhere else and potential attackers know it.
That’s what saves lives, not disarming people who would harm no one. You know, the peaceful and just?