Reader Chip in Florida writes:
This is one of my favorite visual illusions. Are you looking at the tip of a cone or down into a well? You are getting sleepy…very sleepy…but I’ll come back to the graphic soon. Robert ran an opposing view op-ed for USA Today titled “Gun control is not the answer.” In it, he pointed out — and rightly so, in my opinion — that a bunch of the usual suspects jumped at the opportunity to use the San Bernardino as a political tool to promote their gun control agendas and did so while the bodies of the victims of that shooting weren’t even yet cold . . .
Scrolling down to the comment section underneath the article on USA Today’s site — always a gamble because you never know if you are going to get thoughtful comments or screeching monkeys flinging poo — one comment stood out. Someone by the name of Jean-Paul Sartre posted this:
It does not make sense to refer to a city or a state that has stricter gun control when the greater part of the country does not. Remember, we have no border guards from one state to the next. That is your answer.
This idea that the neighboring states don’t have enough gun control isn’t a new one; Chicago’s problems are, they say, due to imports from Indiana, Mississippi and Wisconsin. California would be a gun-free wonderland if only Nevada and Arizona had the same laws. New York City gangs would be weaponless if not for Virginia and Georgia.
The ‘not enough gun control over there’ excuse is hardly original, but it’s becoming more commonly used by the anti-rights crowd. But it’s certainly not very well thought out, because if there is so little gun control in those supposedly lawless states, why don’t they have the same crime problems as Chiraq and the Big Apple?
Let’s go back to that graphic: is it a cone or a well? However you see it, it’s a metaphor for the firearms debate.
To the civilian disarmament industrial complex, it’s a cone. They see themselves, naturally, as the top. “We have gun control here, we are more enlightened, we are more civilized, everyone looks at us with envy and they crave common sense gun control like ours. We only have a crime problem because of the lax laws where the troglodytes live down at the fat part of the cone. We occupy high ground and if those states that don’t restrict guns aw we do would just be more like us, they too could join us here at the top of the pyramid.” The gun-control crowd sees themselves as, in a word, elite.
To gun rights supporters that graphic is a view down into a well. They look at places like California and see a problem. The pro-gun crowd understand that criminals go where crime is easiest to commit and what’s easier than having a large group of people that aren’t allowed to defend themselves? More criminals mean more crime-ridden areas. They are the low points, the bottom of the societal well. Places where the citizens can’t fight back because they are disarmed by law ultimately become bad areas. The gun rights crowd see the problem of gun control as something to be guarded against. Step back people, there is a hole there you don’t want to fall into.
Like any good debate, there is are three-sides: Yours, Theirs, and the Truth.
You and They will see gun control from opposite standpoints. They will see it as a good thing we obviously need more of. You will see it as bad and something to be avoided at all costs. The Truth regarding gun control is that the guns aren’t what we need to control. Guns don’t cause commit crimes.They are inanimate objects and all the laws in the world won’t stop those who would use them for evil purposes. Trying to control them is a fool’s errand.