Phoebe Maltz Bovy has a totally new idea nobody ever thought of before to save America and maybe the world from bad things forever.
This brand new thing she just thought of is pretty heavy, so I’ll let her do the talking:
Ban guns. All guns. Get rid of guns in homes, and on the streets, and, as much as possible, on police. Not just because of San Bernardino, or whichever mass shooting may pop up next, but also not not because of those. Don’t sort the population into those who might do something evil or foolish or self-destructive with a gun and those who surely will not. As if this could be known—as if it could be assessed without massively violating civil liberties and stigmatizing the mentally ill. Ban guns! Not just gun violence. Not just certain guns. Not just already-technically-illegal guns. All of them.
I know… whoa, amirite?
Bovy — an American expat in Canada, for what that’s worth — offers the following detailed plan for removing 300,000,000 or so guns from the hands of law-abiding and non-law-abiding Americans:
[CRICKETS]
OK, so perhaps Bovy hasn’t completely thought through her totally original plan nobody ever before considered even just a little. However, she does offer the following specifics which I’ve quoted exactly and put in handy bullet-point format for your convenience:
• “We shouldn’t ‘take them away’ from people who currently own them, necessarily,” writes Hollis Phelps in Salon. Oh, but we should.
• Banning guns urgently needs to become a rhetorical and conceptual possibility.
• It’s just so ingrained that banning guns is impossible.
• It’s about placing gun ownership itself in the “bad” category.
• The NRA exists! [I’m willing to stipulate this point. -VP]
• What’s needed to stop all gun violence is a vocal ban guns contingent.
• It’s absurd to reduce an anti-gun position to a snooty aesthetic preference.
On that last point, yes, heaven forbid we should treat pieces like Bovy’s unseriously.
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