OPINION: Are there viable solutions for gun violence?
Aurora, Sandy Hook, Charleston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, Santa Fe. These are some of the deadliest mass shootings in recent years in the United States. In just these few instances, 187 lives were prematurely taken and close to 700 innocent people were injured. Reflecting on those numbers now is breathtaking. Because of the evil actions of a few deranged human beings, many families have been broken and countless lives affected in ways they probably did not think were possible.
All of this has brought gun-control to the national forefront. A trend has seemed to be reversed, though. In previous instances, it’s almost as if these tragedies were forgotten. Emotions were high for a couple weeks or even months. Political rhetoric was spewed. But soon after, the nation moved on. Now, it is different. Undeniably, the students of Stoneman Douglass High School have kept gun-control in the headlines and national conversations much longer than before. It’s been four months since the Parkland shooting, yet their campaign is as strong as ever.
However, despite their efforts and lobbying, no major gun reform legislation has been passed since the shooting. Many ideas have been proposed, but nothing has been put into law just yet. That begs some important questions. Why has nothing been done yet to curb these atrocities? Is there a even a solution to stop gun violence?
I believe that there are viable solutions to this issue. However, there are many proposed solutions that I think are inadequate and might even be more harmful than they are helpful. I would like to operate under one assumption, though: no matter what “solution” passes, we will never completely end gun violence. There will always be someone out there who bypasses laws, goes unnoticed, and commits these types of crimes. In no way does that mean we shouldn’t try to fix this issue. As long as we can significantly reduce the frequency and fatality of these shootings, it’s a win. I feel as if many people operate under the idea that we can completely stop gun violence all together. Frankly, that is silly and will lead to disappointment, anger, and frustration when these events inevitably occur again. We must strive and fight to do all that we can, knowing that we can’t do it all.
Banning Semi-Automatic Assault Rifles
Many have called for a ban on semi-automatic assault rifles, specifically AR-15’s, seemingly the weapon of choice for mass shooters. It’s a military-style weapon that can be modified to hold high capacity magazines, is effective at medium and long ranges, and shoots as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger consecutively. It is much more capable of producing mass casualties than a handgun, such as a Glock G29 or M1911. A handgun has a smaller magazine capacity and is only effective at short ranges. Eliminating access to weapons such as AR-15’s seems to be the logical first step in decreasing the fatality of mass shootings. A bad guy with a handgun can do far less damage than the same person with a semi-automatic rifle.
There is one major issue with this proposal: it ignores that fact that most gun deaths occur with handguns, not with AR-15’s in mass shootings. A report by the FBI shows that in 2014, 5,562 of victims of homicide were murdered with handguns, as opposed to 248 due to rifles. A study by Statista reports that in 2016, 7,105 people were murdered with a handgun, while 374 were killed with rifles. Obviously, there is a very dark and glaring issue with gun violence in America, but the idea that banning semi-automatic assault rifles is the solution does not hold up. It completely ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of gun deaths are due to handguns. I’m assuming that the goal is to end all gun violence, not just curb mass shootings. Only banning assault rifles would be a spit in the face to the thousands of victims murdered by handguns every year. Their lives are just as important as the relatively small proportion of those killed in mass shootings every year.
Blanket Gun Ban
Since banning semi-automatic rifles like AR-15’s comes nowhere near to fully solving the issue of gun violence as a whole, the next logical argument is for a blanket gun ban. This would involve repealing the 2nd Amendment, the right to bear arms. There are many issues with this option, so I will go over each of them briefly.
First, in places where there is a blanket gun ban, such as the UK and Australia, gun deaths have drastically decreased but violent crime as a whole has done the exact opposite. This mainly stems from people not being able to protect themselves against attackers. A short video by Glenn Beck with more details and statistics explains it well here.
Second, it ignores how difficult it would be round up the shear amount of firearms in the U.S. An FBI estimate puts the total number of privately owned guns at, at least, over 200 million, with other estimates putting it at close to or over 300 million. To contrast, in 2015 the FBI reports that there were almost 1 million law enforcement employees. The idea that gun owners are willingly going to give up their guns or that the police will effectively be able to go door to door and collect these weapons is absurd.
Third, even if guns are illegal, people will still have access to them one way or another. Think of illegal drugs and steroids. Drugs such as heroin and non-prescription opioids are banned, yet people are still using these substances and overdosing at alarming rates. Steroids, more specifically performance enhancing drugs (PED’s) are illegal in every major sport, yet every year we hear about players being suspended over the use of these drugs. Just because it’s illegal, does not mean it’s not available.
A blanket gun ban would be an example of a solution that would do more harm than it would good. It takes guns away from law-abiding citizens and does not guarantee that those same guns will not be in the hands of criminals. The law-abiding citizens would have no way to defend themselves against the criminals who would have those guns either way.
Metal Detectors and Single-Point Entries
Right now, the country seems occupied with solving the issue of school shootings rather than gun violence as a whole. Because of that, many solutions revolve around how to make schools safer for children. Reforming the infrastructure of schools has been the main talking point for the Right after the Santa Fe shooting, which includes adding metal detectors and single point entries.
However, I don’t think these would be effective. In fact, I think adding single point entries to school would cause more harm than good for a couple reasons. First, I’m not sure how we would expect all students to arrive to class on time in the morning if they all have to go through the same entrance just to get to class. I went to a high school with about 1,200 students, and that was small for my area. Even with a relatively small number of students, I could not imagine the struggle of trying to get to class on time with having to first get through a Disneyland-style line just to get on campus. The same issue is true for metal detectors. It would slow the whole process of simply getting to class on time in the morning.
A more glaring issue of single point entries is that it could cause school shootings to be more lethal. Any student wanting to shoot up the school could easily show up to the one entrance to campus in the morning and fire into the crowd of students just waiting to get to class. I think it’s absurd that the Right is advocating for this. Surely, they are not dumb enough to have not realized this painstakingly obvious issue with single point entries. But, I digress.
As I said before, the addition of metal detectors in schools would slow the process of simply getting on campus (think of airport security), but there are other issues, too. It takes away from the environment of school. Schools should be open places where learning and creativity is encouraged. As a student, I think starting the day walking through a metal detector takes away from that atmosphere. For many, school feels like a prison. It shouldn’t look like one, too. Metal detectors also share the same problem with single point entries in that there would be a large group of students that are sitting ducks if a shooting were to occur.
Ultimately, I think metal detectors would simply be ineffective. If someone was hellbent on shooting up a school, they could simply shoot the armed guard(s) at the metal detector and waltz on through. There are so many issues with both single point entries and metal detectors that I’m surprised people believe they would work. I hear a lot about “common sense gun laws”, however, I find no common sense in these proposals.
More Armed Guards/Arming Teachers
In my opinion, this is one of the most viable solutions to stopping school shootings. Theoretically, the more people with guns on campus, the less likely someone will want to bring a gun and cause a mass shooting and the quicker one could be stopped. This is why shooters don’t typically go to military bases or police stations. The goal of many mass shooters is to cause as many deaths as possible, almost like a video game. Police stations and military bases are heavily armed, where as schools are relatively gun free. A school is an easy target. So protecting a school like you would, say, a police station, should greatly reduce the frequency and fatality of school shootings. There are still issues to be had with this proposal, though.
First, arming teachers or having more armed guards does not necessarily mean that they will take action during a shooting. We saw this in the Parkland shooting, where the school resource officer waited outside the high school while the massacre ensued. Some have said that all teachers should be armed. Surely, not all teachers want to be armed, so it is useless to arm people against their will. Arming all teachers also presents a huge liability in ensuring that all guns are responsibly accounted for and that no student has access to the weapons. The addition of multiple armed guards outside of the few resource officers a campus may have takes away from the school environment, like the addition of metal detectors would. Schools would look like military bases, with officers at every corner precariously holding assault rifles.
Nonetheless, I support the arming of teachers on campus. I think we should introduce laws like the one a Texas school district just passed, shown below, in every school district, nationwide.
I think this may be effective for many reasons. For one, it’s voluntary. Only the people who want to have guns and who are brave enough to protect their students in the case of an attack will be armed. The anonymity may seem random, but it serves a good purpose. Students don’t know which teachers have a gun, so if for some reason they wanted to steal their weapon, they would not know where to go. This is in contrast to arming all teachers, where a student could walk into any classroom and potentially steal an instructor’s weapon. The anonymity also works against students who may plan to attack their own school. If the student knew which classrooms had guns and which didn’t, they may plan their attack around that, buying themselves more time before an armed teacher arrives. Instead, a would be shooter has no idea which areas of the school may be “safer” for him. Having multiple armed teachers has the same effect as having armed officers in a police station, as well. If an attacker knows that a campus is armed to the brim with teachers ready to protect their students, it will greatly discourage them from attempting a mass shooting there.
I think arming teachers in this way would be a great first step in attacking the issue of school shootings. Less attackers would choose to go into schools, knowing that they are no longer vulnerable with the protection of armed teachers. And if an attacker does choose to attempt a mass murder at a school, they would be swiftly met by any number of armed teachers coming from all sides. Laws like the Texas one above should be implemented in all across America as soon as possible.
Stricter Background Checks
In the U.S., every state has laws that ensure that anyone who seeks to buy a firearm must first go through a background check. Background checks have proven to be overwhelmingly effective in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, even in states with the most lenient background checks. However, the problem is not background checks themselves, but rather the loophole of being able to purchase a firearm without going through a background check.
The background check system does not apply to unlicensed, private sellers. For example, if I were to sell a firearm to you, the reader, I do not have to do a background check on you. An article by Giffords Law Center reports that 96% of inmates convicted of gun offenses obtained their guns through this loophole. If those inmates went to a licensed gun shop, they would have been subject to a background check and denied the ability to purchase a firearm.
Many have called for stricter background checks, but I’m not exactly sure they know what they are talking about. I think people assume that the background check system is broken and needs fixing, but that is not the case. The background check system is highly effective. What does need to be fixed is the loophole that allows criminals to obtain a firearm without a background check.
As presented by the Giffords article, only nineteen states and Washington DC have laws that extend the background check to at least some private sellers. Only nine of these states and DC require a background check for all sales, from licensed or unlicensed dealers, for all firearms. This effectively disarms criminals seeking to purchase guns through the loophole.
As with arming teachers, I think all states should pass similar laws to eliminate this loophole. I see no downsides to doing this. If almost all criminals convicted of gun charges use this loophole, why is it still there? Passing laws like this across the nation keeps guns out of the hands of criminals. This solution is more effective for curbing day to day gun violence than it is for mass shootings. The Las Vegas shooter obtained all his weapons legally. The Santa Fe shooter stole his father’s weapons, which he owned legally. However, as I presented before, the overwhelming majority of gun deaths are homicides with handguns. Criminals who shouldn’t have firearms in the first place are committing these crimes. St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, the three cities with the highest murder rate according to an FBI report in 2015, all reside in states without these laws. Oakland in California, one of the states with these laws, has an exceptionally high murder rate, but it is still a third of the St. Louis rate. Laws that eliminate the loophole would greatly decrease the majority of gun violence in the United States.
Mental Health Reform
Mental health reform has been the rallying cry of the Right for many years. Their slogan, “Guns don’t kill people, people do”, is meant to demonize the shooter rather than the weapon. And it makes sense. If it’s the access to firearms that’s causing so much gun violence, then America should have much higher murder rates, given that there could be more than 300 million guns in the country. According to an article posted by worldatlas, the murder rate in the U.S. is 4.88 per 100,000 people. Compare that to Honduras, which has a murder rate of 108.64, but only has an estimate of between 850,000 to 1 million guns, according to GunPolicy.org. There’s a valid argument to be made that gun violence is caused more by the people who have access to guns rather than the guns themselves (this is also why closing the background check loophole is so important).
I agree that there should be a mental health reform. The suicide rate in America is exceptionally high at 13.7 deaths per 100,000, according to the CDC. I checked multiple sources to see how that ranked against the rest of the world and saw different results. However, each source has the United States in at least the top 50 for highest suicide rates in the world. What’s even more shocking is that almost half of all suicides in 2015, 22,018, were via the use of a firearm, according to the CDC article above. The most prominent issues of gun violence do not reside in schools or on the streets of crime ridden cities, but in the homes of the mentally ill.
For this reason, there should be a greater emphasis on mental health in our society. So often, people, especially students, are told to “suck it up”. Success, in the form of good grades, college acceptances, high salaries, and promotions, have trumped the value of mental stability. Access to mental health services and resources should be expanded in schools and the workplace and made affordable, as the cost of health care, in general, becomes increasingly unaffordable. Teaching of the importance of mental health and the resources available should also be encouraged in the education system and the workplace.
Fixing the mental health problem also falls on us, as citizens. We should not turn a blind eye to the person sitting alone at lunch, to the person always making an effort to ensure their wrists are covered, to the once friendly coworker whom you haven’t spoken to in a week, now. We need to look out for our fellow citizens. We need to be friends to them, even if we’ve never spoken to them before. We need to let them know of the help that is available to them. Sometimes, we need to take a break from being so self-centered and focus on the needs of others. That person sitting alone at lunch might just be planning a shooting at your school. That person covering their wrists might go home and kill themselves tomorrow. That coworker might shoot his wife and himself tonight. We just don’t know. It would be much better to take the time to talk to these people than allow any of the events I just described to occur.
Before I go on, I want to make two things clear. First, I am not sympathizing with people like school shooters. I’m not blaming their actions on mental health and I do not think they can use that for an insanity plea. They are completely responsible for their actions. However, any school or mass shooter is clearly coming from a very dark place and is strenuously struggling with something. If the warning signs are present, I would much rather see them get help in a mental health facility, for example, rather than spend the rest of their lives in jail after murdering multiple people. Second, if you are someone who saw the warning signs but decided not to do anything, the shooting is not your fault. At lot of times, the warning signs aren’t even there. Even if they are, I understand. We are all busy people and it can be difficult to take time out of our day to seek help for other people. Like is said before, these shooters are completely responsible for their actions. Just because you didn’t see the signs or couldn’t help does not make you guilty in any way.
Conclusions
Are there viable solutions for gun violence? Absolutely. Unfortunately, I think the solutions that could do the most to fix this issue are the ones not many people are advocating for. Instead, we have the Left arguing for gun bans and the Right advocating for metal detectors and single point entries. Both of those proposals are not how we are going to solve gun violence. So what should we fight for?
First, we must understand my previous assumption: gun violence will never be completely solved. We need to work to decrease the frequency and fatality of gun violence, but, sadly, it will always be there.
Second, advocate for the Second Amendment. An infographic by americangunfacts.com (with sources listed) shows that guns are 80 times more likely to be used to protect a life rather than take one. It also states that approximately 200,000 times a year a women uses a gun to protect herself from sexual assault. The Second Amendment does a lot more to protect it’s citizens than harm them. Gun bans take guns away from law-abiding citizens and does not guarantee that it will do the same for criminals.
Third, if you are a Conservative, do not advocate for metal detectors and single point entries. This seems to be the rallying cry of the Right at the moment. I think I clearly expressed why these systems would be ineffective and could be even more harmful than helpful above.
Fourth, arm teachers in schools. We shouldn’t request more armed guards or to arm all teachers. Instead, every school district in the nation should adopt laws like the one passed in Texas described above.
Fifth, end the background check loophole. Every gun sale, whether through licensed or unlicensed sellers, should require a background check. Background checks are highly effective. However, the absence of background checks in the sale of guns between private citizens has been shown to put guns in the hands of criminals.
Sixth, increase the availability and affordability of mental health services. As individuals, we also must work to look out for our fellow citizens.
Lastly, increase police presence in high crime areas. I did not go into details of this aspect, but I believe it is equally important. We need to keep criminals off the streets. We need to keep people safe from gang violence. A higher police presence makes it harder for criminals to commit crimes and makes it easier to catch them.
There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to gun violence. There are multiple aspects that need to be tackled. By advocating for the ideas above, we hit every aspect: mass shootings, day-to-day gun violence, and suicides by firearm. For too long gun violence has plagued the United States. It’s time to put an end to that. The “common sense” proposals we see in national news are not common sense. We need to think a little bit outside the box and understand the depth and complexity of the issue we are dealing with. I encourage you to fight for the lives of the tens of thousands of innocent people prematurely ended every year due to this issue.
