Denying Your Gun Rights with Fake Solutions to Fake Problems
Part two of a series exploring gun control
The gun control debate is back in the headlines with the mass shooting in Orlando. The stakes are high, and citizens, politicians, and homeland security professionals are all weighing in on the discussion. These articles explore the positions for and against increased gun control measures in the United States. Where do you stand?
Counterpoint is here:
Denying Your Gun Rights with Fake Solutions to Fake Problems
With yet another mass shooting, the recurring debates have started again. Once more the politicians are engaging in a rhetoric of fear and overreactions, placing the blame on the instrument of a criminal act instead of the person responsible for the act. Maybe it makes us feel good to think there’s a simple solution — that disarming people is going to solve our problems once and for all. But that argument is shallow and short-sighted. And it’s dangerous. Here’s why gun control isn’t the answer:
1. Evil people aren’t going to follow your rules
Bad people will figure out a way to get guns to commit crimes. Gun control measures designed to impede legal gun ownership are only going to affect the people who are already following the rules and are less likely to commit crimes. Why would it make any sense to make it harder for honest people to exercise their Second Amendment rights, when the proposed solutions solve nothing? Most guns used in crimes are obtained by transactions that already violate federal or state law. Sixty percent of citizens buy their guns legally, but 90% of criminals obtain their firearms through the black market. Gun control measures aren’t going to do anything but leave law-abiding citizens vulnerable. We should focus on actually implementing the laws we already have before writing new ones.
2. There is no correlation to the number of guns in private hands and gun violence
Despite the number of firearms increasing by about 10 million every year, and despite the increased media sensationalism, there has actually been a decrease in violent crime and gun crime in the United States since the early 1990s. The data does not support the claim that decreasing the number of guns on the street decreases the amount of gun violence. Most gun-related deaths are suicides, and decreasing the number of suicides in the US will take far more than taking away guns. Let’s be honest here, we want an easy solution for the terrible problem that is gun violence — in all its forms. But we must realize that an easy solution is just not possible. Gun violence is a multifaceted issue and requires much more than simply decreasing the amount of guns on the street.
3. “Assault weapons” are not the problem
Look anywhere in this resurging debate and you’ll see this thing called the “assault weapons” ban. The term sounds scary, so the easy solution is to ban the scary-sounding thing and poof we are all safer. What constitutes an assault weapon is hazy and generalized, but it really just boils down to something that looks like it’s military-style. It’s somewhat disingenuous. These so-called assault weapons and semi-automatic firearms available to civilians fire one bullet with one pull of the trigger. What politicians are calling assault weapons do have military-like design features, but they are not machine guns or a rocket launcher or a tank. This is rhetoric. And the data does NOT support the assumption that mass shootings are mostly these types of weapons.
4. Banning the mentally ill from owning guns will solve nothing
Rather than focusing on keeping guns out of the hands of people, we need to focus on the hard issues — actually dealing with mental illness. Roughly 42.5 million American adults suffer from mental illness. Only 41% of that 42.5 million receive mental health services and just 62.9% of the adults with serious mental illnesses receive mental services. And even if someone is diagnosed with a mental illness, by and large they cannot be forced to take medication. In many States anyone over the age of 13 years old has the right to refuse medical treatment.
Most mentally ill individuals are not a threat to others, and some are also not threats to themselves. Creating a law that deals with these very difficult nuances is near to impossible, and in order to ban individuals from buying guns, the government would need to create a list of the mentally ill. The mentally ill already face enough discrimination and mistreatment, creating such a registry would just deter people from seeking the help they need. Let’s call this argument what it is: This is meant to equate gun ownership with mental instability, and it’s a cheap trick to inject fear mongering into the debate.
5. Gun education is appropriate, not gun regulation
As mentioned above, any statistic that states the number of gun deaths or injuries per year does not include just homicides. It also includes suicide as well as accidents. One way to significantly decrease this number is by increasing gun education and training. Again, we do not need to make it onerous to own a gun, we simply need to properly educate and train children, young adults, and adults on how to properly handle guns.
Let get down to brass tacks. The Second Amendment to the Constitution says:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Some continue to argue that banning guns and making it more onerous to own them doesn’t violate the Second Amendment, but this ignores the plain language of the Constitution. The right of the people shall not be infringed, which is precisely what gun control seeks to do, no matter how the restriction lobby shellacs it. This right exists because we, the people, are responsible for the security of the United States. The government should not be allowed to sell that security down the river, leaving us vulnerable and weak. It is our duty to protect the country, even against the expedient politics of its own leaders, when those leaders are threatening the very security of our homeland by disarming its citizens in violation of the Constitution.
Law-abiding citizens don’t own guns to commit crimes. Let’s focus our efforts and our resources on the criminals, not on the honest public.
