We Are More Afraid Than Ever of Gun Violence, But the Truth Is the Murder Rate Is at a 50-Year Low

[Straw Man]

57. So many misconceptions ...

... so little time.

Put it a different way - all over Europe - a continent with more people than America - kids are safe enough to walk to and from school.

As they are where I live. But not everywhere in America. It's a big country, and a widely varied one.

Most people I know wouldn't be scared to leave their car unlocked on the street or their front door unlocked all day.

And where is this? A friend of mine tried that in Tokyo, where the crime stats are even lower than Europe's. It was fine for several months, and then one day he came home to an empty apartment. He had been robbed. There's relaxed, and then there's foolish. In any case, what does the availability of guns have to do with common burglary? Answer: nothing.

My kids literally have never even heard of a school shooting.

Great. But school shootings are outliers in the overall problem of criminal violence.

I went through metal detectors in High School in the early 90s. Kids in my high school were shot.

And where was this? I live in a semi-rural area of upstate New York, and this doesn't happen. In cities, even small cities, where there is heavy drug and gang activity, it does happen. But it's not because there are more guns there; there are plenty of guns in the country.

The percentage of gun owners killing all those Americans is also beside the point. If you have to suffer to save thousands of kids a year - and by suffer I mean have your toy taken away - then so be it.

Making guns illegal in America wouldn't save "thousands of kids a year." It would save very few, if any. The conditions that breed criminal violence would still exist, and an illegal trade in guns would flourish: just one more product to add to the smorgasbord of organized crime.

And even less when you simply look at all the innocent people that die so you can own a gun.

Innocent people die because someone kills them: guns aren't doing it by themselves. You will not eliminate that possibility by eliminating guns. At most, you will put a dent in it, and the gain won't be without other costs.

I simply don't care about your desire to have one. It pales in comparison to all of the dead Americans.

And I simply don't care about your desire to take it away. At most, you'd be putting a Band-Aid on a society that has cancer. Removing rights as a means of addressing social ills might be tempting, but it's not progressive, and in the long run it doesn't work.

I don't think it should be a right and would indeed support the police knocking on your door and taking it away.

Will these police have guns? Do highly militarized police forces bother you? Where do you think they will begin? Where are they most likely to find illegal guns? Do you see the irony?

Even if it only saved a few hundred children a year.

And what about those who would die because they lack an adequate means of self-defense? Is that part of your calculus?

Your right to a toy doesn't supercede citizens rights to live in safety.

The Second Amendment doesn't exist to protect the right to own toys.