Whenever someone says that it’s easier to get a gun than whatever, they’re generally wrong. Oh, sure, someone might say, “It’s easier to get a gun than perform a kidney transplant,” in which case, sure. I’d go along with that.
Yet that’s generally the exception.
However, I came across an op-ed that also isn’t wrong in its comparison. It’s just that comparison is idiotic in and of itself.
Two weeks after the funeral for Amerie Jo Garza, 10, the first of the Robb Elementary School students to be interred following the Uvalde mass shooting, I phoned the manager of my local Domino’s in Stamford, Connecticut, to inquire about a delivery job.
Though I’ve never driven professionally and have been out of the job market since turning 70, I felt confident about my chance of being hired. I have a valid driver’s license. I’m insured and have my own car. Since my last citation more than a decade ago my record has been clean.
So I was somewhat surprised when the manager said that while he needed a driver and I sounded like a good candidate, he couldn’t hire me on the spot even were I to ace my interview. First I’d have to pass a corporate background check.
The author tries to go on to illustrate that it’s harder for him to get a pizza delivery job than it is to get a gun.
And, sure, it is in many cases.
However, such a comparison is idiotic to an extreme.
You see, for one thing, getting a job delivering pizzas isn’t a right. It’s an agreement reached by the driver and the pizza place where money changes hands. As a result, the party with the most leverage tends to set the terms. Since the pizza place will have plenty of applicants, by and large, they can decide if they perform a background check, interview, or whatever.
That job isn’t my right as an individual, it’s their right to determine whether I get offered the gig or not.
Yet not every job requires such a thing. The author even seems to find out when he calls a different pizza place and they’re damn near ready to hire him over the phone. Good luck finding that happening with a gun dealer.
Anti-gunners love trying to make these comparisons in an effort to illustrate that guns are just too easy to get hold of. Former President Barack Obama was fond of them, saying it was easier to get a gun in some places than a vegetable or a book.
Yet, as with Obama, these are pretty much all male bovine excrement comparisons. They’re apples to attack helicopter comparisons.
For Obama, the only way he could remotely be right was through illegal gun sales, and more laws aren’t going to stop an already illegal activity. Lawful gun sales are far more involved than buying a book or a head of lettuce.
This one though? This one is special.
After all, getting a job isn’t even a commercial transaction like buying a book or a vegetable.
But that’s how people like to frame these sort of things. They want to make it out like being able to buy a gun is just far too easy.
Never mind that criminals aren’t buying them from gun stores lawfully. Never mind that more restrictions aren’t really going to save lives but may actually cost them. None of that matters. What matters is that this dude found something that was slightly more of a headache than he thinks buying a gun actually is.
This is what we’re up against, folks.
What’s worse, though, is that a lot of people looked at this crap, nodded, and thought to themselves, “That’s a good point.”
It’s not. It’s not even a point. It’s a writer who was trying to find something to write about before his deadline and that’s the best he could come up with.
