A pretty damned good piece of writing by Mr. Robinson. And it hits the major points very well. And this from a man who wishes it were not so.

I must take issue with one of the predicates he puts forth:
The practical benefits of effective gun control are obvious: If there are fewer guns, there are fewer shootings and fewer funerals. As everyone knows, in the District of Columbia -- and in just about every city in the nation, big or small -- there are far too many funerals. The handgun is the weapon of choice in keeping the U.S. homicide rate at a level that the rest of the civilized world finds incomprehensible and appalling.

This just isn't borne out by the experience. Washington DC is one of the prime examples. London is another. New York is another. Very restrictive gun laws have had no positive effect in lowering violent crime. Urban areas with liberalized possession/conceal carry laws have much lower violent crime rates.

This leads me to a thesis grounded in my left wing views. I believe that the root of the American murder rate lies in its worship of capital above the value of the working class. Hang with me on this, now. It is the desire for wealth, and the cornering of that wealth that creates a desperation as the gap widens, for a piece of that wealth. This is one of the reasons why large urban cities with mass poverty are the highest violent crime areas, in spite of their restrictive laws. Solve hopelessness and you solve the crime problem. Give kids a fair shake at the future and they don't turn to guns. Further evidence of this lies in the fact that in rural and suburban working class areas, where legal gun ownership is much more of a norm, suffers statistically from a very low violent crime rate. Although, with the further centralizing of wealth that we are seeing now, I think this will go up. And it will go up because of the ever widening circle of ripples from the stone first cast by the Reagan administration, that recreated the cult of worship of the capitalist "job creators". The belief that they lie at the foundation of our wonderful society is folly. What made the 20th century the American Century, was the creation of a larger middle class with rights and voice, that had the ability to create a decent lifestyle for more and more people. That is what created the marketplace and lifestyle. We did not eliminate all hopelessness, and we had many failures (racism, sexism, etc). But we let the capitalists back in the door after several decades of reforms that were getting us there. And they did it by playing these wedge cards, such as the issue of guns. We let them divide us over it.

The issue of guns in the hands of legal owners who use them responsibly for a variety of reasons, including self defense, has no bearing on the violence we see in the cities, and increasingly in the suburbs and rural areas. If that were not the case we would have seen violent crime there for years. The problem lies in a system which allows the number of billionaires to rise geometrically, worships it on TV, while millions have to choose between gas, food, and the prescription drugs. Violence is caused by hopelessness on one end of the economic spectrum, and the greedy protecting their ill gotten gains on the other. What lies in between are decent human beings trying to get along.

Mick