(This is a “hot button” topic. If you’ve not commented here in the past, then I encourage you to read my policy on comments and spam before commenting now.)

So, another day, another mass-shooting; ho-hum. The NRA and other gun lobbies will noisily declare – in absolute defiance of all logic and evidence – that if only there were MORE guns, such tragedies would not occur. The staggering costs of gun violence will be dismissed out of hand, even and especially on those vanishingly rare occasions when they are mentioned at all. Meanwhile, gun advocates will brazenly insist – again, in absolute defiance of all logic and evidence – that gun control is incapable of effecting gun violence.

This last piece of nonsense deserves special attention, given that the absence of basic reasoning is so manifestly stark. The claim essentially amounts to insisting that since gun control laws cannot be 100% effective (which is to say, completely eliminate all forms of gun violence), then they can only be completely ineffective and useless. In other words, even if gun control laws only reduced gun violence by 1%, those 330 lives saved each year (since we slaughter over 33,000 annually), simply don’t matter. And let us apply the above “reasoning” to other laws: making murder illegal has not ended crimes of murder; so by the same argument, we should make murder legal. The same approach applies equally to every other law and regulation out there. Continue reading →