he difficulties of the debate are illustrated in Christopher Hitchens' sarcastic article in which he insults gun control advocates and makes such outrageously inaccurate statements as this: "Try calling the cops in the event of an assault on your home or your person and you risk being told in so many words that such stuff is beneath their attention" (Hitchens. 1994, 7).
The argument, of course, is that if you want protection, you better get a gun. After mocking gun control laws, all Hitchens' can come up with as an antidote to gun violence is having gun-owners "acquir[e] the rudiments of weapons training" (Hitchens, 1994, 8). While such training is indeed a positive step, it primarily effects accidental shootings, or access of children to adults' guns, and does not preclude the necessity for gun control laws.
Jacob Sullum's National Review article is another specious anti-gun control piece. Sullum argues that California gun laws, rooted in a two-week waiting period and background check (involving criminal and mental health records), are ineffective because they failed to stop the purchase of a gun by Colin Ferguson, the man who shot 23 people on a New York subway, killing 6 of them.
Sullum's argument is deeply flawed because he fails to consider how many potential killers failed to buy a gun because of those laws, and how many did not even attempt to buy a gun because they knew they would have such a waiting period and/or would have to go through such a background check.
The counter-argument might be made that any criminal who was scared off by such laws would be able to skirt those laws by purchasing a gun at a trade show or by illegally purchasing a firearm on the street. This is a reasonable argument, although finding evidence to support such an argument would be difficult, for it would involve tracing the history of a gun used in a crime, and such a history could involve layers of lies and subterfuge.
Still, th...