Monday, April 10, 2017

More guns = more road rage incidents: why you should oppose misnamed constitutional carry

Conservative pro-gun extremists are trying to make Minnesota a so-called Constitutional carry state, meaning no one requires a permit or any training whatsoever to carry a loaded handgun concealed or otherwise.

These crackpot extremists would have you ignore -- or as they do, deny -- the considerable body of evidence that more guns, and more lax gun regulations, result in significantly more gun violence with no corresponding decrease in any levels of crime, violent or otherwise.

In short, guns are impulse violence weapons, and there is no upside in trying to subvert or pervert the US Constitution to accommodate the gun huggers' obsession with carrying around deadly weapons in a civil society.

Guns are weapons of impulse violence, both in aggression towards oneself, in suicides, and towards others where anger and frustration are present. Thetrace.org study found the incidence of road rage, for example, have doubled since 2014, as reported "Road Rage Shootings Surge on America's Highways and Byways."

There is no upside to (not)Constitutional Carry.  Nothing in the Constitution says this kind of dangerous demand by gun nuts has to be indulged.  No rational evidence says that desire to be armed in public should be indulged either, either.

What makes us safer is fewer guns, most of all fewer guns in the hands of the angry and impulsive who are more prone to misuse them.  In a 2015 study, quoted in the Trace article, Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science, studying the relationship between anger and guns, found 1 in 10 who self-reported owning and carrying guns, with destructive behavior patterns, including getting into fights and breaking and smashing things.  And a 2006 study from the Harvard Injury Control Research CenteršŸ˜¢

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