Gun crime and punishment
All I have been hearing about on the news today is whether this D.C. gun law is going to be upheld by the Supreme Court. NPR has been particularly insufferable, hosting panel discussions between diametrically opposed gun apologists and flower children, neither of whom have added anything new to the debate. (Although I did hear this gem: one of the Second Amendment people said something like, “As soon as you introduce gun control, banning free speech is next!”)
I’m all for banning guns. Aces to California, where I believe the strictest gun laws in the nation can be found (see also: flower children). Unfortunately, gun crime is hardly going to disappear when my utopian vision is realized and the sale and possession of firearms is declared illegal. Truly taking care of gun violence and chipping away at the dent in our nation’s rather inglorious crime rate will require some creative solutions to very complex problems (almost 80% of guns used to commit crimes are already obtained by illegal measures anyway, for instance). Luckily, I had nothing to do for two hours today as I was zoning out in my Field Seminar (that lovely biweekly support group for disaffected Social Work students whose trust fund did not prepare them for a job where they might be called a white bitch or have to sit in a counseling session with someone who hasn’t bathed in awhile) and I have come up with the solution that may go a long way toward solving our nation’s gun problem, without even disturbing the Second Amendment, that divine right under which free speech would topple if it were stripped away.
Make it illegal for dudes to have guns!
Think about it: they’re the ones that commit the most gun violence (by a huge margin according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report ,2006). And they’re the ones who are most often the victims of any time of gun violence, including assault, armed robbery, and homicide (a whopping 77.5% in fact, according to the FBI data from 2003). Our culture socializes little boys to like guns (ever watched Saturday morning cartoons? played a video or computer game? walked down the boy’s aisle in a toy store?), turns them into teenagers who go out of their way to prove that they’re not queer and seize upon any opportunity to flaunt their masculinity*, and then sits back and watches as gun violence spikes upward year after year. Of course, there are more factors that drive men and boys to purchase guns but you get the idea. Sure, women own guns too, but we grew up with My Little Pony and Cabbage Patch Kids being crammed down our throats, two cultural icons that I think would fall squarely under the “flower children” heading.
For men’s safety, we should introduce a gender ban on gun purchase and ownership: if you have a penis, you don’t get one. (Sorry post-op FTMs, this includes you too. Although we might make an exception with drag queens. I’m curious to see how nice people on the street would suddenly be to a drag queen if they knew she was packing in ways besides the obvious.)
*Masculinity is not a bad thing; in fact, it is a good and necessary thing which is part of all of us to some extent, whether we are male or otherwise. However, our mainstream culture’s conception of what is “masculine”–what it looks like, talks like, thinks like, behaves like–what it is supposed to be–is very, very sick. (So is femininity, for that matter. Boy, gender relations have really arrived in this country, haven’t they?)
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