Regardless of the rationale for
owning one; regardless of the "glorious" history of both guns and gunplay and
their stake in the emotional crutch of American exceptionalism; and regardless
of the dedicated fervor of the bumper sticker N.R.A. logic spat out by some
bunkered down Second Amendment connoisseur, what's irrefutable is that guns are
designed for one function -- to kill,
Indeed a gun has zero capacity
to carry out its intended purpose on its own, a fact upon which the "guns don't
kill" semanticists rely heavily. But
that's the point. Yes, guns are an inanimate, unthinking vehicle for the
delivery of death regardless of whether the one holding it is an Episcopal
priest or just some dude who's bat-sh*t deranged. But not only do guns shoot bullets that kill,
they also serve as a surrogate provider of contrived empowerment to far too
many emotionally under-endowed macho front artists whose definition of gun
control is holding a pistol with TWO hands.
Fair enough. But as a practical
matter, our response to gun-violence must also be grasped just as tightly. It's said that the level of a problem's
solution must be above the level of the problem itself. In this case, the problem boils down to the
right of unfettered ownership of devices designed for the sole purpose of
killing.
My solution? Let every gun nut in America have such
devices. Give them their guns -- as many
of them as they like. If it makes them
whole, then I say let them have all the gats, Glocks, 9-millies, and
pump-shotties they want. Give them all unfettered
access to as many guns of any kind that they can possibly shove into a
back-pack, a pick-up, an 18-wheeler, stretch limo or one of those adorable
minivans a lot of the soccer moms drive. Give the people what they want; be it a blunderbuss or one of those
street-sweeping AK-47 N.R.A. crowd-pleasers.
Just make it as financially
costly as humanly possible.
Chris Rock once quipped that
one way to reduce gun violence would be to charge a thousand dollars a
bullet. I'd go a few steps further. Why not a starting price of $500,000 per for
something you might be able to fit in a derringer? The N.R.A. insists upon the unfettered
availability of guns? No problem. Let the people have all the guns they want;
just make it as hard as possible for the people to load them. We're talking bullet, not gun control. The N.R.A.
can't have it both ways and as far as I know, the National Bullet Association
doesn't exist.
As for the eventual emergence
of a flourishing black market of bullet bootleggers, treat them the same as we
do crack dealers and terrorists or child pornographers and runaway slaves.
Give the bootleggers their own
Gitmo. Chase them down. Hound the sh*t out of them. Drone them where ever they're found whether
it's Abbottabad or
Manhattan. Those we capture can be
displayed in see-through, bulletproof plexi-glass Hannibal Lector-like lockdowns; as much for the spectacle as for
the sheer irony of bullet bootleggers imprisoned in bulletproof cages. Meanwhile, if it so happens that from time to
time, the efficacy of both their plexi-glass cribs and some newly-confiscated
bootleg bullets need gauging -- oh well. Just have the bootleggers huddle in a corner for a while.
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