What If We Treated All Crimes Like We Treat Gun Violence?

Recently, I’ve been barraged by e-mails and facebook posts from buffoons claiming that the United States is trying to outlaw all guns and weapons, everywhere, without any notice or discussion. This is a stupid lie being spread by the paranoid and uninformed.  In response to the feat that gun violence laws will take away American weaponry, many people are trying to find alternative solutions to gun violence OTHER than taking guns away.  One of the most common suggestions to counter gun violence is that we should start arming more people for their own safety:  Teachers should be given weapons to protect their classes, for example. The thought process is that if a potential victim is armed with a weapon, then criminals won’t act out.  (That’s why the inner city is so safe, right?  If you threaten someone with gun violence, their response is…peaceful acceptance, of course!) 

This issue ignores the reality that most mass murderers are mentally unstable and don’t seem to care about if they live or die, but the argument for arming our teachers continues to pop up in all sorts of media. That’s why I’d like to offer the opposition a chance to really get to the bottom of their belief system. So I ask: 

What if we treated all crimes like we treat gun violence?

Performance enhancing substances.

The news regularly likes to report about steroids and doping in sports. What if we treated steroids and doping in sports the same way we’re being told to treat gun violence? Sports would certainly be fairer, if everyone was on an equal playing field! The only way to make sports fair again is to put everyone on the same level, and fight steroids and performance enhancing drug abuse by giving all athletes in sports steroids and performance enhancing drugs.

Sorry Lance, but you're the new face of doping for sports!

 If a 300 pound behemoth of a man is charging down the field at you, it seems only fair that you also be a 300 pound behemoth too. Admittedly, the shrunken testicles and copious rage problems might crop up as problems from time to time, but isn’t it worth it if our sports heroes can feel safe again?  Instead of giving the person who abused the system a punishment after the fact, we need to preemptively level the playing field and give their victims the same power as the people abusing the system.  We can’t even just give steroids to a team when we KNOW the enemy team is using steroids, because punishment after the fact is clearly not deterrent enough. We clearly need to give steroids and performance enhancing drugs to all of our athletes, to be safe.  And wouldn’t baseball be more fun if we had another Mark McGuire hitting home runs every pitch? If we treated other crimes like we treat gun violence the world would be a better place.

Drug Abuse.

In many rural communities across the US, and particularly in the Midwest and south, dangerous drug abuse is on the rise and is a problem for law enforcement and civilians alike. Breaking Bad even glorifies the problem, making the drug peddlers into a sort of anti-hero, out to make money in any way they can. Right now, we do silly things like regulate how much non-drowsy allergy medicine you can buy, or how much cough syrup.  What if, instead of handing punishments down after problem arose, we instead leveled the playing field:  Give everyone drugs, so that no one is at a disadvantage.

We make great TV about drug abuse, we should be proud!

If a coked up druggie breaks into my house at night, I’d feel safer if I too had a few pills in me.  After all, you pretty much can’t feel fear when abusing meth; you’re too busy losing teeth and trying to stop the shakes.  If we treated drug abuse the way we think we should treat gun violence, maybe we wouldn’t have civilians scared to leave their house because of their druggy neighbors or dangerous communities.  No one would be scared, because they’d be just as scary and out of their minds high themselves! Trying to talk to a heavy drug user is impossible when you’re sober yourself. If BOTH people in the conversation were trashed out of their minds the argument still wouldn’t be rational, but it would certainly be more energetic. Instead of interventions, we’d have Heroin parties, so everyone can have equal footing and have first-hand experience.  If we treated other crimes like we treat gun violence the world would be a better place.

Identity theft

Identity theft is a serious problem in the United States. Someone loses a wallet or pays for an online purchase at a sketchy website and ends up with a long list of strange charges on their credit card bill and a painfully expensive lesson about protecting their identity. But what identity thief would dare to steal someone else’s life if their own were stolen in response! Just like guns, we should make the threat of retaliation part of preventing crime! To protect yourself from gun violence, get a gun: To protect yourself from identity theft, steal an identity. Truly, this concept is genius. I

Because sometimes the ID card for "Donald Trump" looks like a 5'2" Asian woman.

I expect that identity theft would stop within days if it was legal for victims of identity theft steal the identities of the person who stole theirs.  After all, no one wants their identity stolen, right?  Violent and dangerous criminals tend to be very rational, right? They might not fear the law, but violent criminals would probably fear retaliation! Going to jail and losing their working life isn’t a serious threat for criminals, but having their identity stolen might stop them! If reactionary identity stealing were legalized, identity thieves would stop stealing identities so that their OWN identity would be safe, it’s so clear now!  If we treated other crimes like we treat gun violence the world would be a better place.

Animal Attacks

Too often, a bear attack or other wild animal attack pops into my e-mails as a warning to all of those of us living in places like Alaska. Entirely seriously, as part of my departmental safety training as a biologist I took an online course in how to respond safely to moose and bear attacks! But despite this training, I can’t help but wonder: Could the same principles we apply to gun violence be applied to animal attacks? If you want to avoid being attacked by an animal, you should have a wild and angry animal of your own.

Don't worry, this picture's fake.  But animal attacks really happen more than you might think.

As it stands now, if a bear or similar creature attacks a person we usually put the animal down. If a dog goes wild and bites someone, we put the dog down.  The same goes for wild animals. But punishment after the fact might not discourage animals from attacking. The only logical solution is that people need to own equally dangerous animals for their own protection. Imagine how rare a dog bite would be if you had an angry, violent attack dog with you at all times.  For those of us living in wilder places, wouldn’t it be safer to travel with a trained attack bear or a fighting lynx? Wild animals aren’t going to attack you when you’ve got a frothing-at-the-mouth killer bear with you!  And ignore the risk of the animals you’re training as attack-beasts turning on their owner.  That would be like worrying about violence from the people we should be giving guns to for their safety.  It’s not like giving more people guns could ever possibly go wrong!  If we treated other crimes like we treat gun violence the world would be a better place.

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Though meant to be sarcastic and amusing, the truth is that the solutions above and the idea of arming ourselves in order to DISCOURAGE more violence isn’t logical. In some countries, owning a gun is legal and gun violence is low, but that simply isn’t the case in the United States.  We have a problem with violence, and handling it by giving out more weapons seems a rather foolish step.  Until we can be a less violent people, giving us weapons is going to do little more than cause further trouble. Using weapons to retaliate against violence is like trying to stop terrorism by threatening retaliation against civilians from the terrorist’s country. It won’t stop the mentally deranged individuals who commit these crimes, and will only serve to cause more possible violence by hurting more innocent people. After all, are murderers, particularly mass murders who use high-powered weapons, the sort of people who commit their crimes because they fear consequences?  Personally, I doubt it.

Hopefully this post made you think, and the absurdity of the examples made you chuckle. Thanks for reading BB+B, and I hope to hear from my readers about what they like, disagree with, agree with, or want to see changed.  Thanks as always, and feel free to check out some other fun posts, like “Regional Stereotypes:  Uncomfortably Accurate" and "Too Hot vs Too Cold:  Let's Compare".

Thanks for reading,
Brian, the Author Guy