Whether it is emotion or just a crude attempt at achieving political goals, America has walked that path of good intentions before:

Now I generally don’t support the “don’t just stand there, do something” school of criminal law. When all the proposals seem likely not to work, or do more harm than good, implementing one of them for the sake of “doing something” strikes me as a mistake.

But let me offer a concrete analogy (recognizing that, as with all analogies, it’s analogous and not identical).

Every day, about 30 people are killed in the U.S. in gun homicides or gun accidents (not counting gun suicides or self-inflicted accidental shootings). And every day, likely about 30 people are killed in homicides where the killer was under the influence of alcohol, plus alcohol-related drunk driving accidents and alcohol-related accidents where the driver wasn’t drunk but the alcohol was likely a factor (again not including those who died in accidents caused by their own alcohol consumption). If you added in gun suicides on one side and those people whose alcohol consumption killed themselves on the other, the deaths would tilt much more on the side of alcohol use, but I generally like to segregate deaths of the user from deaths of others.

So what are we going to do about it? When are we going to ban alcohol? When are we going to institute more common-sense alcohol-control measures?

Well, we tried, and the conventional wisdom is that the cure was worse than the disease — which is why we went back to a system where alcohol is pretty freely available, despite the harm it causes (of which the deaths are only part). We now prohibit various kinds of reckless behavior while using alcohol. But we try to minimize the burden on responsible alcohol users by generally allowing alcohol purchase and possession, subject to fairly light regulations.

We know that alcohol is a very destructive substance. Alcoholics don’t just wreck their own health, but have an substantial and adverse effect on their families.

Our focus is now on alcoholics, not the general public that uses alcohol lawfully and reasonably. There is no good faith reason why we should treat gun-ownership any differently.

Not that the gun-grabbers let a thing like good faith, or facts, stand in their way.

Gun-grabbers claim people who support the Second Amendment don’t care. Yet, they seem to have no problem putting law-abiding people, like these old women, in harms way.

second amendment