The Problem With Gun Control

This past Friday, an unsuspecting man was slammed against a wall at gunpoint and had his belongings searched for what was supposed to be a firearm. 29-year-old Jeremy Bell was reported to have been sitting at his desk behind a closed door in downtown Toronto's teehan+lax, a user-experience design firm, with a handgun earlier that day, as reported to the police by a keen-eyed neighbour in a nearby building. What the report neglected to indicate, most likely by fault of the whistle-blower, was that the gun was made of Lego.

This is just sad. In a country where the possession of an easily disguised firearm is in almost all cases a felony, the handgun has become somewhat of a taboo item reserved for cops and Briggs drivers. And the sight of such a weapon in any place other than on the hip of a well-uniformed, straight-shouldered suit sets off the alarms quicker than a druggie with a butterfly knife.

We should be insulted. How stupid does a person have to become to criminalize the weapon instead of the weapon-wielder. Oh, the guy holding the toy Lego gun gets a mouthfull of drywall, sure, but for what? A failure to keep the deadly weapon stashed properly inside his jacket?

Now, it's understandable, possibly even acceptable, that a dignified human being, however paranoid, should be reluctant to accept his fellow man as the culprit and assign the blame, instead, purely to whichever object obviously caused the damage. But then, it's also understandable that the man who loses his wife, kids and job in a single day would drink himself into a stupor and drive into oncoming traffic. What we easily forget is that understandable does not mean tolerable, and that no system is smart enough to do our common sense-related thinking for us.

We have brains, people! Bringing a Lego gun-lookalike to show your friends is as much a crime as eating too much cake at the monthly work birthday party. Bringing a real gun to work to blow your coworkers' brains out, on the other hand, equates roughly to that of soiling the cake before anyone eats it. The difference, it can be hoped, is obviously that of intent. The end result may be similar--comparable, at least--there definitely was a gun at work, or there definitely was not enough cake for everybody, but the outcome, and the planning beforehand, were galaxies apart.

The point here is that our lazy thinking is putting us out of shape. We can as much fault a man for bringing a bunch of Lego to work as we can a video game for a teenager hanging himself. Although, it seems we've started doing that, too. Let's open our eyes and get with the program, shall we?