After writing some impassioned pleas in favor of gun control after the Aurora shooting this summer, Adam Gopnik weighs in on the topic again in the New Yorker. There may be reasons to argue in favor of gun control, but a big problem for those in favor of curbing gun rights is that they often display a fair degree of ignorance. Gopnik, who can be a persuasive and elegant writer, is no exception to rule, alas. Take this paragraph:
In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at their school. Afterward, the British gun laws, already restrictive, were tightened—it’s now against the law for any private citizen in the United Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho Seung-Hui used at Virginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred there since.
Gopnik, however, might spend time on Wikipedia before dashing these things off:
The Cumbria shootings was a killing spree that occurred on 2 June 2010 when a lone gunman, Derrick Bird, killed 12 people and injured 11 others before killing himself in Cumbria, England. Along with the 1987 Hungerford massacre and the 1996 Dunblane massacre, it is one of the worst criminal acts involving firearms in British history.
It’s true that the Cumbria gunman didn’t use a handgun, which were banned in the U.K. after Dunblane. But if this is meant to argue that that prohibition laws would prevent mass shootings in a country where there are over 300 million firearms, this example only seems to show that they don’t work in countries where they are already in place. Just to underscore the point:
In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.
