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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (13995)	12/4/1997 12:45:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I can see why the gun debate is so difficult, Alex, just by our first two attempts yesterday. If I understand you correctly, you believe that if we just tighten up the laws in this country, and really arrest and imprison everyone who uses a gun improperly, then everyone else could have guns happily and there would be few problems. I believe that this society is inherently much more violent than any other civilized country, and I cited that url on comparitive gun violence in western societies to support that. Because of our frontier heritage, and the level of violence we allow our children to be exposed to on an everyday basis, I don't think it is possible to have guns widely available in the society. I would also argue, and the statistics support this, that the sheer availability of guns for crimes of opportunity and of passion, almost exponentially increases the number of shootings of every kind. On the NBC news last night, there was a long feature about guns and children--guns in schools in particular. There have been 191 deaths of children in schools since 1992, half of them in rural areas, half in cities. Twenty percent of children have carried a weapon to school, mostly for protection. While you are arguing, I believe, that most of this social pathology is because of latch key kids and poor urban kids with no future killing each other, which somehow is much less threatening than white middle class kids being shot at random, I think I disagree. The child in Kentucky was the son of an attorney. He had been taunted for a very long time, apparently, specifically by some of the children in the prayer group(!). He was bright but small for his age, and felt powerless, and something snapped. In other societies children feel powerless--growing up can be hard anywhere--but because guns are not readily available, these feelings are expressed in non-fatal ways. I am not sure if you are advocating imprisoning all the children who take guns from their parents, but to me, there will be way too many people in jail. I guess I would like to discuss the gun issue in a more pragmatic sense--how can we solve the issue of guns in a fair and safe manner which benefits the society we already have. Reengineering the entire society doesn't seem to me to be workable on a practical basis--I would like it to be, but it's just not going to happen. And I think the easy availability of guns is a big CAUSAL factor in the social pathology. So how can we talk about guns as guns, not as proxies in an anxious debate on social ills, if we are already so much in disagreement? I would argue that we have to take the society as it already exists.