It’s because everyone is in some way victimised, but many people sublimate their sense of oppression onto an issue that is more tangible or of a more manageable scale. It’s easier to focus on the idea that ‘gummint gonna take mah gunzz’ that to explore the issues that are actually making you feel paranoid, and even harder to embark on the journey of personal change (because the values that lead to your oppression have been internalised) that is necessary.
That’s a better measure of success than “what percentage of firearms are used to commit crimes” but I still don’t think it’s the most important metric. If the number of gun owners suddenly tripled and the number of gun deaths only doubled, it would be hard to argue that was an improvement over the current situation.
In my opinion, the number that really matters in the gun violence debate is still “gun deaths per capita.” And that’s where we Americans trail far, far behind most of the developed world.
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See it is hard for me to rationalize banning or restricting something when only a tiny portion of the population is abusing it. I feel that way about most things, like drugs, especially marijuana.
As for gun deaths per capita, I think it is hard to directly compare the US to other nation because of the differences in social economics, race relations, the various cultures, classes, etc etc. Guns don’t cause violence, though I will concede it might make it easier or more deadly. But if you magically removed the guns, all of the forces leading to violence would still be there.
There are scores of heavily regulated dangerous things that only a tiny portion of the population abuse. What percentage of people fly jetliners into buildings? How many people who use dynamite use it to make bombs? Of the people who acquire radioactive materials, what portion of them use those materials to cause harm?
We don’t regulate things based on how often they are abused, we regulate them based on how much damage they can cause when they are abused. Abuse a car and you can kill half a dozen people; abuse a jetliner and you might kill thousands. We don’t say “cars are abused more often than jetliners, therefore we should place more limits on who can drive than who can fly a jetliner.”
Somehow I suspect that if we had one of the lowest rates of gun violence instead of one of the highest you wouldn’t have any problem comparing us to other countries. Besides, places like Canada and Australia aren’t as different from us in terms of culture or socioeconomics as you might think.
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I probably have less of a worry/fear about the potential to abuse things than you. I am sure everyone has a different comfort level.
Maybe we should loosen dynamite restrictions. We could have more stories like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzabmVIU6EQ
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