Abbe Boulah’s Weblog

Good evening, fellow Taverniers. What is the topic of your heated discussion tonight?

Oh. we were talking about this latest speech on gun control..

Good grief. I am getting so tired of this endless gun control discussion that doesn’t get anywhere. Didn’t Abbé Boulah come up with the solution to the gun control issue a while ago?

It must have been a very foggy night, Bog-Hubert. Do you remember what it was?

A foggy night it was indeed. But the solution was great, as well as impossible.

You speak in foggy riddles, my man. Try to explain, will you?

Okay. I’ll try. The solution was a bit technological. It involved fitting all the guns with a WIFI device that would make the gun usable only at a person’s home, where the WIFI router is located. Well, maybe at designated other places such as shooting ranges.

Now how in the world would that be a solution?

Don’t you see, Renfroe? It would allow people to have guns at their homes, for protection. That would take care of the argument that people must be able to protect themselves against criminals, that the NRA is using in its polemics against gun control — as well as the argument they can’t use but that is the big elephant in the room, that the gun industry wants to sell guns. They can even make more money by making and selling those WIFI devices, and pretend to go along with the gun control idea while protecting their interests… Why are you shaking your head, Vodçek?

I see. That seems to take care of one of the issues in the second amendment: protection against criminals — ‘if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns…’. So guns without such devices are automatically outlaw guns — but you can’t really prevent their existence with that policy, can you? So will it really help?

Damn, you are right. But at least the criminals can’t count on people having no protection in their homes. That ought to make a difference. And then deranged people can’t take their home protection guns down to the school cafeteria or their workplace and start shooting kids or coworkers. Or to serene places of civilized communication like this Tavern…

True. But you used the word that’s really the problem: Aren’t many if not most of those shootings done by people that are, as you said, ‘deranged’? If I remember correctly, many of those were using various kinds of medications — antidepressants, right? So how would you deal with that aspect? I know the buzzword is ‘background check’ — are you going to force doctors and psychiatrists to report patients to whom they are prescribing such drugs, so that they have to give up their guns? Good luck. You’d be fighting the medical professions as well as the gun lobby.

Hey, maybe the devices should be in the ammo; combined with the home or shooting range WIFI, or even just instead of those, they would detect if somebody is using such drugs, and simply not work for such people?

Good idea. That would take care of a lot of police and military types as well.

Wait. Those conditions are building up by people’s situations and jobs and relationships — perfectly sane people — until they snap. Even before they have been diagnosed with anything and prescribed medication?

Well, you can’t win them all, obviously. But if all the mass shooting incidents where such drugs were involved could have been avoided, it would make some difference. Do we have enough data on all that?

Not only that: what about the second amendment asserting the right of the people to bear arms to protect themselves against the government going berserk?

Aren’t you forgetting the missing part of that statement, the one that would make any resistance to out-of-bounds government meaningful and effective in the first place?

What’s that?

Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that part: ‘a well-regulated militia’. Renfroe?

Yeah, I keep yelling that to my neighbor who keeps shooting at my dog anytime that poor critter gets anywhere near the fence: “You ain’t a militia, and you ain’t well regulated!” And that goes for the entire NRA, if’n you ask me…

So Bog-Hubert: why were you saying that the solution Abbé Boulah was talking about is not feasible?

Well, isn’t it obvious: it’s too bipartisan, but not enough? Neither of the parties — I mean the gun control people, nor the gun lobby can claim the idea as theirs; it lets people keep their guns and the gun industry sell more, which is unacceptable to the gun control people, and it restricts the use of the guns with things that must get registered or added to guns or ammo, which is unacceptable to the NRA…