how many hits will this title generate? i don’t care, but i’m curious to see the butterfly effect!

Recent events have got me thinking. AZ passing laws that pretty much legalize any gun anywhere by anyone, the Giffords shooting, and reports that local gun stores sold about 150 AK47s in a month to the same   guy completely legally.

Note the above sentence has no predicate.   If diagrammed, it would fall over. and as the world’s most ambivalent person on the subject of gun control, i think it has.

I was raised on the east coast, in suburbia, where there were no guns.   When you never see a gun you never need one. I’ve shot rifles at camp, and an AR15 with a friend in the desert, and its fun! I studied philosophy for longer than healthy people ought to, and every ethic and metaethic i know wants to hug their guns to their breast, for freedom, and because freedom is not free. I’ve lived almost half my life in Arizona, and go places a gun might just be the jic that could save my life, though i’ve yet to have needed that jic after living nearly half my life in Arizona, even though damn near everyone else is packing. The place I’m most likely to need a gun is Mexico, where guns are illegal, and the phones are unreliable, and the police are slow. What are the odds that standing up with the gun will lead to a better outcome versus letting them have my stuff and hoping?   How many people are hurt by their own guns, by people they know, cause there is never enough training and acculturation to cure drunk or stupid? How many criminals are just killing other criminals?

Its all spun round in my head for so long as pattern and background and the din of shouting and the lack of agreed-upon data. The substratum of every philosophy includes a leap of faith.   The two things i know are this: if guns are illegal, criminals will still have them. and, the Founding Fathers never imagined that one person could easily, affordably, reliably pack the firepower of a regiment.

Why do so few people get this?

We have regulations surrounding cars, and mostly they work, as you can’t drive if you can’t pay, and responsibility is enforced. Except that if you are using your gun you don’t care about the regulation, and won’t. Its not a car, its not obvious, its not mostly not-deadly. Guns are small, and hideable, and used beyond the law. The law does not apply.

I know there must be compromises that have better or worse outcomes. My wife wrote a dissertation on the effects of regional rules on productivity over time during the turn of the century, with boxes full of musty old books that might have given our dog cancer.   Its not possible that a multi-level study on guns vs. crime vs. regions vs. other factors can’t be regressed. There needs to be a common baseline, because the current sentence is unbalanced.

Why do so few people get this?