The thought processes of gun control advocates are fascinating, to say the least. One recurring theme is the notion that anyone, anywhere can turn from a sane, law-abiding citizen into a murderous maniac. Nobody can be trusted not to shoot his neighbor, the thinking goes, so all of us are in need of regulation by the government.
This Huffington Post article discusses mental illness and gun control. It quotes long-time professional anti-gun advocacy researcher Dr. Garen Wintemute as saying,
“The vast majority of firearms violence is not committed by people who are crazy. It is committed by people like us.”
A long trail of scientific research, of course, tells us that murderers are not at all like normal people. To quote the criminologist Don Kates,
“Local and national studies dating back to the 1890s show that in almost every case murderers are aberrants exhibiting life histories of violence and crime, psychopathology, substance abuse, and other dangerous behaviors. …roughly 90 percent of adult murderers had adult records, with an average adult criminal career of six or more years, including four major adult felony arrests.”—Kleck G and Kates DB, “Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control,” Prometheus Books, Amherst NY 2001, page 20.
A skeptic might write Wintemute’s nutty statement off as just another cynical deception by the gun control lobby. But I’ve heard the same sentiment from many gun control advocates. Apparently they really believe it. They are employing the classic psychological defense mechanism of projection, or attributing their own fears to other people. In this case, the fear is the gun controllers’ fear of their own aggressive impulses. They are actually afraid that if they had guns they would, in a fit of rage, use them against the people around them. This alarming tendency among gun control advocates is just more evidence that too many of them are driven by emotion and are immune to reason.
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.