So, in the wake of the Aurora shooting, Bloomberg and others are leading the charge for the call to have even greater gun control than we had previously. I suppose this was a knee jerk reaction that was bound to happen, but I am still rather put out by it. Occasionally I pull out my pocket watch and wonder when they’re gonna get to the rock music, violent video games, and movies like Batman as causes for the shooting.

Of course, apparently, the guy had shown know real signs of being a danger to anyone before the shooting. Yes, it does seem that his Mother suspected something when the police showed up, but he had no records of being unstable or radical.

(A suspicious man might wonder if his records hadn’t been sanitized for their being connect to certain political groups that would be…inconvenient to certain a Party. After all, as we’ve seen with the Norway Shooter, even having a touch of being to the “Right” is political gold for shutting down your opponents).

But dragging this wandering post back to where I started, they are shouting for stricter gun control. Which is what generally happens after something like this. Ironically, to my view, this is really a bad reaction to have.

See, gun control is based in the Law. Now, I’m sure people are facepalming reading that as being incredibly obvious, but hear me out. Gun control’s power is a legal power, based in the law. It only really works on those that respect the law. To those that have no care or respect for the law, gun control is useless. Criminals can get any gun they want on the black market, as long as they have enough money. In the case of Fast and Furious, our Government will even sell these guns to criminals. The very type of guns that they say law abiding citizens shouldn’t even be allowed to have.

I kinda think that could count as some kind of treason, especially since Americans were killed by those guns. But I digress again.

The fact of the matter is that the harder you make it for people to have guns, the easier it is for body counts like in Aurora to happen. If even one person in that auditorium had had a gun, it is quite possible that the gunman would have been dropped before he got through shooting 70 odd people. If even three people had been armed, it is a certainty that so many would not have been killed and injured.

But by removing the means to protect ourselves, as the US’s stringent weapons regulations have, we open ourselves up to situations like this becoming exactly as terrible as it did. It is because we’ve made it so hard to have a gun already that no one had one. It’s because we’ve made most other weapons illegal, from the very simple knife (beyond 3-4″, all but useless in a fight) and batons, to the more exotic nun chucks and boken, that we’ve taken ourselves from a people able to defend ourselves to fish in a barrel ready to be shot up.

And it’s not just the getting the gun that is hard. It’s the fact that if you use it in an “inappropriate manner” you get serious jail time. What defines a “gun crime” these days is rather amorphous and cloudy. One thing I do know is that there used to be billboards up that say “gun crime means hard time.” And thank you, but I’d rather not risk it.

But that’s me, who is lazy and rather lawful. To a criminal, or someone with nothing to lose…such things mean nothing. The kids as Columbine didn’t care about gun laws of the jail time they might serve for using guns in an evil manner. They didn’t plan to come out. While I don’t know if the dude in Aurora intended to come out alive or not, clearly he wasn’t too concerned with the lawful nature of his gun ownership or use.

But those that potentially could have been armed and stopped them were mindful of the Law. And so they didn’t have a weapon that could prevent the slaughter. Death followed.

My humble thoughts.