flickering pictures

From CNN:

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) — A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Obama’s speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken.

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous about that sentence — the fact that a guy thought it was okay to bring an assault rifle to an Obama speech, or that the law thought so too. According to the article, people in Arizona need a permit to conceal a firearm, but can walk around with it strapped to their back so long as it’s out in the open — even if it fires 600 rounds per minute.

We’ve delved into the gun debate here before, but this is a whole new kind of worrisome. Never mind that the guy could have easily shot a bunch of people. Never mind that, if I were silly enough to protest against improved health care for millions of Americans, I wouldn’t have wanted to stand beside this guy to do it. What’s scary is that he seems to genuinely believe that his assault rifle is making America safer.

We already know that around the world, gun ownership is directly correlated to gun crime. Even with the usual caveats about correlation not equaling causation, I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to say that people with guns are far more likely to shoot each other than people without guns. The USA has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, with 90 guns per 100 citizens. Americans also have the worst homicide rate in the industrialized world. And 70 percent of those homicides were committed with guns.

Funny then, that all those guns don’t seem to be keeping people safe.

Phoenix, with its liberal state gun laws, does better than some U.S. cities in terms of violent crime, but to be honest, that’s not saying a whole lot. It registered 167 murders among its 1.5 million people last year, while here in the larger, less gun-happy city of Montreal, we had just 29.

Next door, New Mexico has both lax gun laws and one of the highest murder rates in the Union — only D.C., Maryland and Louisiana had more homicides per capita.

Head one more state over, and in Texas, contrary to gun enthusiasts’ claims, widespread gun ownership hasn’t done much to decrease violent crime — Dallas had 170 murders last year, and Houston had another 292. The death penalty, incidentally, hasn’t helped much either. Texas, with its 1,415 murders in 2007, still has a higher per capita murder rate than the U.S. average. It isn’t even in the same league as Canada, which had 821 fewer murders despite having 6 million more residents, and you’re three times more likely to be murdered on a Texan street than on a Canadian one.

There may be legitimate reasons for a private citizen to own a gun, but nobody really needs an assault rifle unless they’re planning to shoot a lot of people very quickly. If you’re concerned about home security, it seems to me that a regular shotgun ought to do just fine. And as for hunting, I wouldn’t think there’d be much left of that rabbit after you blast it in half with an AK47.

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