Gun Control and All That Digresses

LET'S TALK GUNS

. . . and probably other things

I racked my brain to figure out what I want to blog about. I finally landed on the casual topic of gun control. I researched, interviewed, surveyed and inferenced a lot of information.

The most annoying thing I realized through my week of investigating was that people against gun control were against it because A) It’s about mental illness, bad parenting, etc and not about gun control or B) They consider it the first step to gun banishment.

OF COURSE, both of these reasons are simply a subject change from the actual topic of gun control. GUN CONTROL. Did I type ‘banishment’ in my last statement? Let me double check. NO I did not. Did I type ‘mental illness’ in my second statement in my third paragraph? NO! So let’s not change the subject.

Yes, guns don’t kill people because they are jealous or angry and wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Although, I do wonder what gun handcuffs would look like. People kill people. But people have to use something to kill with. Or threaten with. Or scare with.

BASICALLY. The issues of current revolve (pun intended) around background checks. The Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act of 1993 requires dealers to background check customers. However, background checks aren’t necessary for private gun sales (it’s illegal to knowingly sell a gun to someone with a criminal record). The act also makes it illegal for the Federal Government to keep a list of names submitted for background checks. This means there is no national registry of gun owners.

ALSO. From 1994-2004 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban prevented the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons with military features such as large capacity magazines.

OBVIOUSLY. States have their own gun laws as well. In Wisconsin, there is no regulation or the law is unclear when regulation is concerned of missing firearms, locking devices, private sales, gun shows, long guns, rifles, and handguns.

MASS MEDIA AWESOMENESS

I shall begin with a fun clip by my favorite funny man Jon Stewart in a video called "John Oliver Investigates Gun Control In Australia." 

I was shocked to discover, in another awesome video, that Michael Moore even disagreed with Piers Morgan about guns. They didn’t cat fight about it but Moore went with the idea that guns don’t just get up one day and go off without a human. Moore even backs up the theory that Republicans have backbones and democrats lack courage.

Where do I stand on guns? I own three. They are quite lovely. A .22, a rifle and a shotgun. I target shoot and I hunt. Well, I mostly target shoot because the hours are nicer. The point of this is that if I didn’t have these three guns I couldn’t do these three hobbies. If a jealous lover or a money hungry man doesn’t have a gun he can’t shoot someone out of envy or greed. Obviously there are other weapons of choice but that is another change of subject! Can’t we just stay on the subject!!!

I ran across an awesome site filled with awesome information about guns.

I calculated a few fun (not really fun, mostly depressing) facts about guns!

• United States average firearm deaths per year (2000-2009 data) is 30,393.7
• Australia average firearm deaths per year (2000-2009 data) is 261.7
• UK average firearm deaths per year (2000-2009 data) is 946.5

I scrolled through the data a bit more and after crunching a few more numbers I discovered something disgusting.

Accidental deaths of US citizens from firearms averaged 690.9 people from 2000-2009. That’s 2.5 times more than the averaged TOTAL gun deaths in Australia for the same decade!

After discovering this fact I frantically Googled the definition of ‘unintentional gun death.’ After finally yelling at my keyboard for continuously spelling ‘unintentional’ wrong I finally spelled it correctly and did not find what I was hoping for.

I wished to discover something about guns just going around and shooting people without humans but no such luck. It’s defined as preventable death. Obviously all death could be categorized as preventable with enough “what if” situations. But again, that is a subject change and we all know how I feel about subject change (it’s bad).

A LITTLE MORE LOCAL

Sheriff Clark and Piers Morgan use calm discourse when peacefully conversing Clark’s recent commercial controversy in this awesome video.

I think this has been a long enough post about guns.

I hope I didn’t bore you. Just kidding. I know I didn't.

I digress to say…have a nice day.