Governing to the 1%

Governing to the 1%

There has been a lot of discussion about guns in the wake of the Arizona shooting. People have been trying to see how they can prevent the next tragedy and people in the days that followed immediately suggested to ban guns from places where federal employees are present. Jon Stewart pointed out succinctly the logistical problems with that proposal in that how are you supposed to know when you are in the range of a federal employee. The thing is we have to do something right? The best description of the events in Arizona was made by one of the podcasts I have just discovered it is called "common sense" with Dan Carlin (no relation, I checked). He described the tragedy as like a natural disaster, like a tornado. It was something totally devastating but ultimately a largely random occurrence. You see from all the reporting this wasn’t some highly schemed attack on a sitting congress person plotted by a group of anti-somethings going after a specific target. From all accounts this could have happened in any town U.S.A. This is important because in order to look for solutions you have to look for the cause. In the case of the shooting there is no single cause.
As I grow older I realize there are many things in this world that happen for a direct identifiable reason. The effect has an absolute cause. However there are a number of things that the causes are so numerous that to pin an effect on any one in particular is a bit dishonest.[1] By describing what took place as a natural disaster you begin to realize that the amount of variables necessary to control this from happening again becomes logistically impossible.
Enacting a law that could prevent this from happening would be governing 99% of the population by what is necessary to keep 1% from causing problems. The problem with things like this is no law can prevent the truly determined. This has been proven time and time again in the “war” on drugs. We’ve banned all the over the counter drugs that contain Sudafed because it was being used to make meth, so now people are getting fucked up and killing themselves on bath salts. That’s right bath salts, and the response has been to try to ban bath salts.

That is not to say laws are completely ineffectual in these cases. No, instead we have to craft our laws as if they were tornado shelters. Mass producing magazine cartridges that hold over 10 rounds does not seem to be necessary, and should be regulated like fertilizers. Some may argue that banning things like this would just relegate them to the black market. While this law would do nothing to the black market, the law would make it difficult for manufacturers to have such large productions which would starve the black market. Think about it, we don’t have millions of thugs running around in this country with sub-machine guns and rocket launchers; for the most part they are using the legal firearms illegally. There will never be a law that prevents tragedy, but there are laws that could reduce the gravity of the tragedy.

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[1] Writing this I realize at first glance I could be giving fuel to the climate change deniers who say it is impossible to know if thing A cause effect B. I’m not. First off it is not that thing A causes effect B, it is that things B through Z can reasonably be explained by thing A and to explain them another way is often a lot less reasonable. Secondly I think denying climate change does nothing to solve the very real problem of the increasing amount of effort and destruction it takes to recover fossil fuels and that the efforts to mitigate climate change dove tails completely with this problem nicely, but I digress.