Gun your Control
Gun Control, I am a fan. I have been reading the European press in reflection on the Virginia tech shootings and the reporting has been largely focused on the failings of the System at the heart of the tragedy. For example the day after the event the first story that I read talked mostly about the fact that the school administration could have locked down the whole campus as a result of an unsolved murder in the morning and a killer that was still at large, the Euro-press concluded that as a result of the school administrations gross negligence in the matter they were largely to blame.
As the days progressed the reporting shifted more to the topic of gun control, and the lack there of, across America. Of course the argument goes that the second amendment protects individuals rights by allowing every individual equal access to guns and that by being armed people are able to provide for their self-defense and preserve their individual rights, controlling guns because they are dangerous is largely dismissed because everyone knows that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. the European response on the issue is that Americans are largely disconnected from reality. The reality is that people with guns kill people. Placing so much faith in the individual to act responsibly is seen by the Europeans as extremely naive. As history has shown all individuals are not created equally, some people are insane, such as the person at Virginia tech, by allowing access to guns by those insane people the whole population of sane people is tremendously endangered. The pro-gun response to that argument is to arm everyone one all of the time, so that when an insane person decided to go on a rampage they can be easily killed by law abiding citizens, however the scenario of everyone carrying guns all of the time to avoid days like what happened at Virginia tech is so unlikely that talking about it as a plausible solution is pointless.
I see the solution of gun control being in a comprehensive restructuring of the way that firearms are sold and regulated in the US. I think that at very least there should be a staged licensing system whereby higher caliber guns require a higher degree of licence, I also think that the such a system should be costly both in terms of time and money, gone should be the days of walmart gun sales.
Americans should always have the right to own a gun, but the process should be hard enough and have enough accountability that individuals who do go though the process are extremely invested in the endeavor. The penalty for non-compliance should be severe. In the current day and age anyone who posses a gun in America without having gone though the above mentioned licensing process, should be viewed as a terrorist and treated as such. We are spending billions of dollars and thousands of American lives fighting terrorism abroad, it is high time we deal with the terrorists at home and start making our streets and schools safer with reasonable new gun control measures, we owe it to ourselves.