State & Municipal Gun Control Laws: Chicken, or Egg?

Reading through Instapundit this morning (it's one of the few semi-political blogs that make it through my company's firewall), I noticed THIS link to a Washington Post article comparing the attitudes towards firearms in Montana and Arizona compared to the maternalistic cocoon that the residents of the District of Columbia are required to live within.

It got me thinking: Are draconian gun control laws in DC, Chicago or New York purely a response to lawlessness, or are they a contributing factor in the formation of said lawlessness?

Looking at it intuitively, I think it's reasonable to assume that people who grow up in a community where they're constantly told that private citizens are unable to practice the restraint and responsibility that is required in order to own firearms and carry them concealed in public JUST MIGHT develop into adults who feel unable to be responsible gun owners? Is this a big surprise? Only if you're the sort of person who would be shocked when you tell your child for 18 years that he/she is an idiot who is only suited to pick up the waste products of their social betters..........and then the kid goes out the week after graduation and gets a job riding on a garbage truck.

If irresponsibility and violence are the product of a "Bell Curve" sort of genetic predisposition, then you would expect to see rural or suburban minority communities awash in violence. As far as I know, that is not the case. To me, this indicates that irresponsibility and violence are "nurture" phenomenona rather than "nature".

In a perverse sort of way, I think you could argue that these gun control laws may encourage the sort of behavior that they were supposed to limit. If community standards teach you that gun ownership is a natural precursor to crime and irresponsibility, then it follows that those who value crime and irresponsibility will be drawn to own a gun. The percentages of responsible gun owners will be skewed downward due to bias keeping more responsible people from owning firearms of any type.

Anyway, it's something to think about.

(This post has been certified as 65% "nuttable" by the AoSHQ Ewok Rating Board)

posted by Russ from Winterset at 01:47 PM

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