Guns Vs Mobs
A tragedy happened today in America, a gunman killed a lot of kindergarten kids including others.
This is sad indeed. A lot of blame is going on gun ownership allowing such tragedies and how US should have stronger gun control laws.
I find myself quite torn at this topic.
First let me clarify that guns indeed kill people. A similar incident happened in China today, Knife attack at Chinese school wounds 22 children. Some day. Fortunately in this case the assailent had knife and not gun, so 22 were wounded and not killed.
What exactly is a gun? Gun is an assurance against mob. A mob of 4 people can get me killed with impunity, even if they have nothing. They can kill me for 10 bucks if they decide to. If I am a female I can get raped.
Giving a gun to all 4 of them and me changes everything. It does nothing to to mobs ability to kill me or rape me, but it empowers me to kill the mob too. It lets me stand up. It makes mob fear me even if I am one.
Very recently a mob decided to take bombay hostage. For three days handful of bikers with flags went around the city of 20 million people, closing all the shops down. No citizen dared to step out, because 4 guys will come and beat him up. The citizens of this city stayed home. They surrendered to the mob. Mob knew they had no guns, they are helpless.
If even few had guns, the bikers would have required to travel with guns. And if bikers travelled with guns, police would not have allowed them to roam freely. Police allowed bikers to roam freely because they were unarmed, "peaceful", "harmless".
If we had guns, police would be dealing with lot more brutal crime.
Mumbai police took 45 minutes to come out of the police station at Regal theatre when those gunmen were roaming on our streets.
Mumbai police has not faced armed gunmen since D company left town. Mumbai police was "defeated by its own success" as Bane would say. Mumbai police is impotent. 164 people died dues to mumbai police impotency, because our police does not know how to handle gunmen. 164 people died because citizens had no guns to do anything against the terrorists.
27 died in Connecticut today.
40 died today in Mumbai routine road accidents. I am glad about my car.
A friend of mine had a gunda running his building internet connection. When he tried to switch ISP, the gunda came with a few men, unarmed men, and forcefully removed his network cables. Would the gunda risk his life for the meagre Rs 500 per month had we been living in a country without gun control, had he had a risk that my friend could have owned a gun?
Gun control only prevents law abiding citizens from owning guns to defend themselves. Criminals are fine with knives, with their numbers, and they are called criminals because they defy laws, like gun control law.
Sure we do not get such sensationalistic news like 27 killed by a gunman in India, but we never do calculation about the number of death due to inadequate medical attention, due to lack of income for daily wage workers and so forth in those 3 days.
I guess if we do not see numbers in headline we assume the number is zero.
I guess too that if gun manufacturers are given free rein, like in US, they will want to sell not just handguns, but automatic assult rifles and so forth. Unless we are invading a neighbourhood army, assult rifle is not a requisite for self defence. They are sold because men love toys and they are very profitable for gun manufacturers.
I think everyone will agree that unless a government provides reasonable gaurantees about access to police protection in a timely fashion, if I report a crime, if police comes within a few minutes, unless that happens, government has no right to take away our ability to protect ourselves from criminals using whatever means we can muster, including guns.
Sure easier access to guns means more criminals will have them, and they will use them against us when committing crime, but the equation will completely change for us. Today criminals know we are utterly helpless and they know police will take forever to come, for criminals attacking us has no risk. They can escape police by moving states. They have no risk of getting hurt during crime. One can argue that if lets say 10% of population had guns, then criminals will have to take this factor into consideration. This will reduce the instances of crime.
So we can see that easier access to guns will both increase some kind of crime and decrease some other kind of crime. Whether or not guns should be allowed is not a decision we can take without doing comprehensive analysis of these two factors.
This becomes even more important for a third world country like India where police is no where adequate to provide even any semblance of protection. Police in India comes only after a crime has been comitted, the response time of Indian police, from filing a complaint on phone to police reaching the crime scene is measured in hours if not days. No politician has even promised that this delay will come to minutes ever. It will require massive beefing up of police forces, improvement in their infrastructure, much larger footprint of petrol cars on the ground, bigger budget and so on. We have no money for that.
