A recent story from America’s largest outdoor shooting range shows us not only the futility of gun control, but also that the whole “ITS THE GUNS ITS THE GUNS ITS THE GUNS” argument doesn’t hold any water. Why? Because Chicago is far from the only place where this is happening.
Let’s start with what’s going on in Chicago these days:
In short, Glock switches are showing up everywhere. But, instead of having to risk buying them from the feds or from Wish, the gangs are now using 3D printers and other parts to build them. So, now, instead of indiscriminate fire from idiots who don’t use sights and need their other hand to keep their pants up, the volume has gone up while there’s even less control.
The local media and the feds they interview for this assume from the get go that the audience will blame the guns for it all. The availability of switches, like the availability of the guns themselves, is assumed to be the problem that needs to be solved.
But, there’s one big problem: Chicago isn’t the only place where 3D-printed guns and gun parts are popping up.
🇧🇪 An 18-year-old woman in Belgium has been arrested after it was discovered she ran an underground 3D-printed gun factory. https://t.co/YgJxotkxiA pic.twitter.com/31VRYtjBME
— Jake Hanrahan (@Jake_Hanrahan) February 5, 2024
It doesn’t take a major gun nerd with decades of computer and design skills to build firearms at home from unregulated parts now. You also don’t need big bucks from a job that required years of experience. Even an 18-year-old girl from Belgium got in on the action, and managed to get herself caught. So, if she could do it, it’s likely that almost anybody can do it if they have a little bit of spare time and a few hundred spare bucks (or Euros).
If just about anybody can do it, this means that there must be hundreds or even thousands of other people in Belgium building guns.
But, hey, some parts can come from nearby Germany, so maybe we need an island with strict gun control to compare this to.
Nope, they’re popping up there, too. And again a month ago.
But, hey, Taiwan is too democratic and respects too many other rights to keep this from happening. Maybe what we really need is a military dictatorship. That’ll stop all guns from being built, right?
Oh, wait, no. That doesn’t stop guns from being made in 2024. So, there is no amount of government control that can stop this. You can’t stop the signal, Mal.
Where’s The Global Wave Of Mass Shootings?
But, if the “ITS THE GUNS” theory was true, where are all of the mass shootings? After all, the shootings are driven by the “easy availability of guns”, so now that this happens globally, there should be a new Uvalde shooting in every country practically every month, right?
But, we’re not seeing Chicago-style gang violence in Belgium. We’re not seeing elementary schools being shot up in Chiayi. Even in Myanmar/Burma where there’s a war going on, we’re not seeing any of the rebels take their new guns to go shoot up a shopping mall.
So, we have to ask ourselves why these other places that now have readily available guns aren’t seeing mass shootings and major gang violence.
The answer isn’t good for the United States. While we’d like to think of ourselves as the best people in the world sometimes, we obviously have some much deeper problems that need to be resolved. People in the U.S. join gangs and shoot at each other in the streets over drugs and stolen property when they get guns in Chicago. People in random places, big and small, sometimes go out and murder school children when people who get guns in other countries don’t do that.
So, we’d better get the big political parties to agree that guns are not the problem and start looking for ways to tackle the real problems that drive this violence in the United States.