Chris Shu of the Michigan Review Blog has noticed something interesting about all the gun control talk happening in America today. He effectively uses sarcasm to make a point here. Isn’t alcohol more dangerous than guns?

All this talk about gun control…

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 12,744 people died in 2009 due to alcohol-impaired driving crashes. By simply making alcohol illegal or putting into effect stricter laws, we could have prevented these horrible deaths. We need to demand that our lawmakers change the current policies. Alcohol needs to be banned or at least made to be very difficult to obtain! It aids in killing 10,228 people per year. Why is such a horrible substance so widely available? Why is it that all a person needs to buy whiskey or vodka is an ID? We need to stop selling alcohol. If we don’t, your children could be the next victims of an alcohol-impaired driving crash and die.

This is an argument I have been seeing everywhere lately, albeit replacing the words “alcohol” with “firearms”. Even disregarding the appeal to emotion rhetoric many proponents of stricter gun control have used, which itself is dangerous, one cannot however, disregard the lack of evidence they present.

(A side note: According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 9,146 people died in 2009 from firearm-related homicides. If anything, more laws should also be devoted to alcohol-control and alcohol treatment. But no opinion columns presently are devoted to curbing alcohol use and drunk driving related fatalities and no one on Facebook is writing statuses rallying for alcohol control. I wonder why that is?)