Finally, I agree with Obama

Depending on which numbers you look at, something like 70% of the gun deaths in the US are gun owners shooting themselves (on purpose or by accident) or shooting family or friends (on purpose or by accident). Most of the remainder are young black males shooting other young black males. Gun restrictions try to curb the gang violence and the known dangerous person, but something like 1,000 guns per day in the US are stolen by burglars and sold on the black market, so background checks and such are of limited usefulness. With about 300 million guns already in circulation in the US, the NRA folk don't have to worry about the government taking them away (it's impossible, even if they tried) and the anti-gun folk don't have to worry that Congress won't pass more gun restrictions (because nothing Congress can do will have any major effect on gun violence.)

The only way to reduce gun deaths are (1) improve access to mental health for those about to snap (2) legalize and regulate illegal drugs, to deflate the drug gangs and narco-terrorists. The gun industry could help (but won't) by moving serial numbers to places more difficult to file off, to add a "loaded" indicator so people could tell that there was a round in the chamber, and to make only-owner-can-fire weapons, so burglars would have no reason to steal them (the technology already exists for this).

But I don't expect anything to seriously change, one way or the other, in my lifetime. 8-<

Fred Askew

Dear Fred:

I'm fascinated -- how does an "owner only" gun work? Fingerprints? Voice recognition?

--Debutante

The reason any measures won't work, Bob, is that there are too many guns out there, legal or not, already. Too late to be effective at this point.

Joan wrote:
>Doubt if most would take advantage of [access to metal health help], & it is worrying for other reasons, including political. Gulags anyone?

There is a constant push between the rights of individuals and the rights of society. Right now the accepted psychiatric criteria is "dangerous to self or others" before you can be locked up. But some say that you have a right to be "dangerous to self" while others say that you can't make a rational choice about suicide if you're mentally ill. And there's a lot of guesswork involved by mental health professionals. Psychiatry is not an exact science.

So, yeah, governments and family members can use a claim of "mental illness" as an excuse to take away someone's freedom and property. But they always could and they always will be able to. There's not really a debate over whether that's a good thing, the debate is over what constitutes "mental illness" and at what point other people could (should?) intervene in someone's life. Is merely yelling "I wish I was dead!" in frustration enough? Or should society wait until you actually make a suicide attempt? Or what?

A psychiatrist I used to work with told me that there are good reasons for suicide and bad reasons for suicide. If the voices in your hear are telling you to kill yourself, that's a bad reason. If you have an incurable disease and only have a couple of weeks to live in excruciating pain while running up huge medical bills for your family, that's a good reason. The law doesn't differentiate. At least in most states. And that's back to the conflict of individual rights v. societal rights. You can end up in a psychiatric gulag and not be mentally ill or you can freely wander the streets, dirty and starving, proclaiming that God is talking to you, and be ignored by the police entirely.

There's no simple answer. And there will always be abuse. Governments like power. And they will take as much as they are permitted.

Fred Askew