Banning or limiting access to guns won’t prevent evil in human hearts

By David McElroy · August 28, 2015

I don’t really like guns. I’ve fired a gun a few times, but I’d prefer not to be around them. I find them dangerous and unnecessary for my purposes in life today. If I see a gun on someone, I’m wary. Whether it’s a cop, a hunter or a thug, I see a gun as a danger.

But as much as I dislike guns, I’m absolutely opposed to efforts that would ban them or limit access to them. Why?

The murders of two Virginia journalists this week on live television has once again stoked the fires of those who want to ban guns or place strong restrictions on who can have them. Those people say we have a gun problem, but I strongly disagree. We have a “human problem.” We have a problem with human beings who have evil in their hearts and minds — and who are determined to hurt people they dislike.

Banning guns wouldn’t solve that problem — and banning guns would create a long-term problem far worse than the one it would allegedly solve.

Progressives who want to ban or limit guns are just as irrational and emotional as the many conservatives who want to ban or limit recreational drugs. In both cases, the position is taken for strongly emotional reasons and the person holding the belief has to ignore the evidence that his “solution” is worse than the problem it attempts to solve.

There are roughly 30,000 deaths related to guns in this country each year, according to statistics I’ve read. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the numbers, but I’m willing to accept them. There are roughly 35,000 deaths from car accidents each year. The number of deaths from the two categories are roughly similar, but we don’t have people piously talking about our “car problem” in the same way that people talk about our “gun problem.” Why is that?

Nobody wants to ban cars or limit who can drive them because everyone understands the tradeoffs involved. We all hate the deaths that result from road accidents, but we don’t yet know of a practical way to stop all these deaths without also eliminating the benefit we all enjoy of having access to quick, simple transportation. Since almost everybody understands why we need this transportation — except radicals who want to force mass transit on everyone — the tradeoff is accepted as necessary.

With guns, though, those who want to ban guns don’t see any tradeoff. They see only the downside.

Some people try to make the case for guns by arguing that they’re worth allowing for hunting and self-defense against criminals. If that were the only positive to be had from guns, the case for banning them would seem much stronger to me. But even if we completely ignore the benefits that many people get from hunting and from defending themselves from criminals, there’s a far more important and more fundamental reason they need to remain legal and widely available.

Ownership of weapons is the last line of defense against tyrannical governments.

Early Americans didn’t value gun ownership so strongly just because they valued hunting and they wanted to shoot potential thieves. They valued the right to own weapons because they realized that widespread ownership of guns was the key to the revolution they had just fought. If colonists of their day had been unarmed — or had lived wth the sort of draconian restrictions favored by some today — they would never have stood a chance against the British army when they decided to revolt.

As much as I dislike guns, they’re the ultimate check against any government. As long as enough people own guns — and those people are united in their opposition to government coercion — they have a chance of fighting back. The elites have to fear an armed populace, because the peasants might revolt if pushed too far.

I dislike guns. I’m afraid of their power. I’m afraid of them in the hands of the wrong people. But I favor their widespread availability and I oppose the actions of those who want to ban them, basically for two reasons.

First, people who want to kill someone are going to find other ways of killing. Evil will remain in the hearts and minds of human beings, now and forever as long as this world exists. Those who want to kill are going to kill. They can make fertilizer bombs. They can stab people. They can mix up various other chemicals. They can poison food and water. Human ingenuity in finding ways to kill seems almost limitless. I think it’s irrational to believe that most of the 30,000 current gun deaths would be eliminated if guns were banned. (Almost two thirds of gun deaths each year are suicides. A person who is determined to die can easily switch to another method.)

Second, I don’t trust governments to have a monopoly on force. As much as I dislike the idea of “the people” as a broad collective entity, the simple truth is that an armed population is harder to control against its will.

The idea of eliminating guns seems superficially desirable. It sounds nice to think that criminals would no longer have access to weapons and violent inner cities would become bastions of peace and stability. It’s a nice thing to imagine that the murdered journalists this week might still be alive or that people murdered in schools or theaters didn’t have to die.

Emotionally, it sounds great, but it doesn’t stand up to the light of reason.

I don’t like guns. They scare me. I’d rather live in a world where nobody commits violence against others, whether with guns or any other weapon. But in the real world where we do live, there is a simple tradeoff involved. Guns provide a strong benefit that can’t be provided any other way. Banning guns — and handing a monopoly on force to politicians and the thugs who work for them — is far worse than the problem of the deaths which occur each year.

I dislike guns, but I dislike the alternative far worse.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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