A lot of people out there blame guns for all of society's ills. They figure that if we have enough control over firearms, we won't have a problem anymore. Never mind that we know that the American non-gun homicide rates are higher than most developed nations' total homicide rate, somehow guns are the problem.
Some states seem to have lawmakers who understand, though, that guns aren't the problem.
In Georgia, the state Senate passed a bill that would create a sales tax holiday in October for guns and firearm-related items including things like gun safes. It's a good bill and it's not likely to do anything to benefit criminals since the bad guys aren't going to gun stores.
But because it benefits gun owners and gun stores to some degree or another, there's an issue.
And one legislator addresses a lot of these issues beautifully.
"Once again, somebody comes up with a piece of legislation, and everybody wants to tie it into gun violence and blame all the gun violence in our country, in our city, in our state, on the instrument, the inanimate object," state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, said on the Senate floor. "Because we all know that the guns are what's going out there and doing it. It's not the individuals with the mental health issues that are going out there and doing it.
"Let's stop blaming the gun, start looking into the communities," Robertson added. "Let's start addressing mental health issues. Quit blaming that inanimate object and quit using it to politicize firearms in the state of Georgia."
Robertson absolutely nails it here.
The heart of the gun control argument is, ultimately, that guns are somehow bad; that their existence and our ability to have them somehow translates into violence, murder, and blood.
Robertson correctly notes, however, that the gun isn't responsible for anything. It has no volition of its own. It lacks free will.
Now, I'm not so sure that we can put all of this on mental health. There aren't a lot of studies supporting that notion, but then again, the people who are conducting the studies also seem to have a vested interest in pushing gun control so I'm not entirely sure those studies are trustworthy.
It's sad when you can't trust the scientific community to just seek the truth, isn't it? Unfortunately, it's a problem.
Still, the mental health thing isn't really important to this discussion. What does matter, though, is that Robertson is right that the gun isn't the problem in violent crime. That's the individual who carries out violent acts.
As noted at the top of this piece, our non-gun homicide rate is higher than other developed nations' total homicide rate. We, as a nation, are more violent. We're more likely to kill one another. Removing guns from the equation, as some want to do, doesn't change that. You'll still have plenty of violent crime such as murder even if guns vanished off the face of the planet tomorrow.
But current efforts to rein in "gun violence" focus not on the offender but on the gun itself. It's ridiculous that all of these facts are out there, available for anyone in the world to see, yet only a handful of people are talking about it.
Robertson is right, and his anti-gun colleagues will refuse to acknowledge that he's right because that truth is awfully inconvenient to their agenda. Instead, they'll pretend that this and other pro-gun bills are morally wrong despite the facts that they choose to ignore over and over again.
Why anyone votes for such idiocy is beyond me, but here we are in a world where plenty of people do it over and over again, then pat themselves on the back for being the better person.
