Dick Armey Makes Really Bad Analogy For Gun Control

While I was taking one of my Political Science classes that are required for my major, I found out that Dick Armey, Former House Majority Leader, was once a professor at the University of North Texas, which is where I currently am studying, and that he was my professor’s professor. That wasn’t important at all to what Dick Armey said recently. I just felt like sharing it.

So Armey went onto CNN recently with Soledad O’Brien to discuss Mitt Romney’s recent remarks on the Colorado shooting, saying that we need to change the culture we are in to help prevent massacres like those in Aurora in place of regulating guns. Armey said, “If in fact he had not been capable of acquiring the guns, he might just as well taken a car and driven it into a school bus.”

This is true. Even without the guns, Holmes did have explosives rigged in his apartment that could have done a lot of damage. Then Armey just goes off the rails and says, “You can’t focus on the object by which a destruction was committed — be it a hammer, a gun, a truck, a car. Focus on the aberrance in the individuals that do this.” Yes, you can, and you should.

He went on to say, “More people are killed in automobiles every year than they are guns. I don’t hear anybody talking about banning automobiles.” Besides the fact of this being untrue, there are regulations put onto cars and drivers, as O’Brien pointed out by telling Armey that there are laws that require seat-belt use and that people have a driver’s license, among many other laws and regulations, hence why we have an entire government department dedicated to motor vehicles.

After there are deaths that could have been prevented with a seat-belt, the government put in place regulations on cars and car owners that they must wear their seat-belts. Armey backed away from the failed metaphor and reverted to the old tactic of crying out the Second Amendment as a last ditch effort to save his argument and that they need to punish the perpetrator, not the tools they use. Again. Yes, they should.

If people started killing people with cars, whether on purpose or not, aside from the obvious focusing on why these kinds of deaths are happening, we would start putting more regulations on cars and car owners. There would be regulations for better driver’s education. More cops on the streets. Tougher enforcement of stricter driving laws. Etc.

None of that is done for guns though, which were designed to kill people. Everything else is regulated to save lives, but not guns, the thing that is meant to be a weapon. Guns are America’s sacred cow for some reason, even though they are a danger to public health and safety.

Current gun laws in America do nothing. They are not even noteworthy. Israel has some of the most guns in the world. It also has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, and it’s gun crimes are severely low. Japan on the other hand has virtually no guns, and it also has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, and it’s gun crimes are also severely low. For more on that, here is a story from NPR on gun control in those two countries (only listen to the first few minutes; I couldn’t get the gun story on its own).

Gun laws save lives. They prevent massacres like the ones in Aurora, Tuscon, Ft. Hood, Virginia Tech, etc. They may not prevent all, but countries like Israel and Japan show that they do indeed save lives. It is still the right of people to have guns, I am all for that, but there needs to be more oversight from the government on these things. It’s the people’s right to have guns, but that right ceases when it takes away or threatens the rights and lives of others, no different from religion.