Wednesday, December 19, 2012

No mood at all...  

I am a gun agnostic. Don't own any. Don't want to. Don't care if you do.

While I would cheer European level gun ownership restrictions, I will not invest any effort to tilt that windmill. It is futile to debate those to whom firearms provide an element in their lives I cannot comprehend. This should be clear to gun control advocates.

But mostly, I think we will outlive this issue as a culture, perhaps in my grand-children's lifetime. 

Consider these trends:



 [Source]

And this one:

 [Source]

 And this one:
 The ownership rate reported is the average estimate taken from "Annexe 4: The largest civilian firearms arsenals for 178 countries. That table gives also the minimum and maximum estimates. Note that for some countries, this margin of error is considerable. E.g. Yemen, ranked near the top with an ownership rate of 54.8, has a low estimate of 28.6 and a high estimate of 81.1. While the United States is ranked for the highest gun ownership rate unambiguously, Yemen based on the margin of error may rank anywhere between 2nd and 18th, Switzerland anywhere between 2nd and 16th. [More]

My conclusion is it will be hard to stuff more guns into the closets of America. The firearms industry will either have to sell innovation (which can only be bad for people) or sell to places where they still don't have "enough" guns. It reminds me distantly of the beef marketing problem.

The US will continue to have a powerful gun lobby and constituency convinced they are protecting some facet of American character that can only be flourish with firearm protection. They will, however, slowly diminish in both number and relevance, it seems.

Like farmers.

No one will take their guns away. Somebody will just sell them after they die. And guns won't make those deaths any less unlikely.



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