Do we feel safer with 350+ million guns?
It’s hard not to fire up and become emotional after Dallas shootings recently. A couple of well equipped imbeciles ambushed and shot 5 police officers dead and 7 went to hospital in various conditions. Most of those officers were transit cops making sure the “Black lives matter” march was safe.
Of course, this news has spread across the globe and all across social media we can find thousands of clashes between those who think guns should be banned or better regulated and those who claim themselves legal owners keeping weapons at home for potential family protection.
I do have my opinion too. And unlike those Facebook warriors I based mine on numbers and facts.
Before I make any conclusions about anything I tend to look at every aspect of what I’m talking about. And with guns it’s surprisingly easy.
Firearms were invented between 9 and 13AD in Asia (China and South Asia) and were used to kill people. Initially for protection. Later to attack. There was no other purpose. Even hunters back then never used guns for hunting.
I think any physical elimination of your opponent is your weakness, because taking a life is easy (you can use a rock or even your fist), but making a real change is hard. It’s hard to see 2–3 steps ahead for many people. And that’s exactly the case with gun owners defending their position.
Gun owners think they are safe and strong now, because they can take potential attacker’s life. But that’s not what data shows.
Look at this map. You’ll see which states own most guns.
Now look here.
If you’re not color blind, you can safely conclude: more guns = more deaths.
Here, from LA Times:
Almost two-thirds of the people in the U.S. population live in homes without guns, and there is no evidence that the inhabitants of these homes are at greater risk of being robbed, injured or killed by criminals compared with citizens in homes with guns. Instead, the evidence is overwhelming that a gun in the home increases the likelihood not only that a household member will be shot accidentally, but also that someone in the home will die in a suicide or homicide.
You’re saying “I need a gun to protect my family”. Well, here’s the hard truth again:
More than 42% of the time, the victim took some action — maced the offender, yelled at the offender, struggled, ran away, or called the police. Victims used a gun in less than 1% of the incidents (127/14,145). In other words, actual self-defense gun use, even in our gun-rich country, is rare.
It is sometimes claimed that guns are particularly beneficial to potentially weaker victims, such as women. Yet of the more than 300 sexual assaults reported in the surveys, the number of times women were able to use a gun to protect themselves was zero.
You would say that all those people in Dallas and San Bernandino and Waco last year were killed using illegally obtained guns? Nope.
All those people were murdered with legally obtained guns and here’s the big picture:
And that is one of the fundamental problems. We have to many guns.
Why do we need this many? To protect our families? Bullshit. You can read this post again and it’s clear that it’s not what happens. Your kids are more likely to commit suicide using your home stored gun than you using it for potential protection.
Representing only 4.43% of world’s population we somehow manage to own 42% of its guns. Are we plotting a war against humanity? Are we afraid the world will attack us and we’d need to use our guns to “protect our families”?
Back to guns and deaths correlation. We know now that States with more guns face more gun deaths. And here’s another proof on a bigger scale.
I know it’s hard to realize that you’re just a number in this game, but it’s true. You, fellow gun owners, make this statistics.
US senate (representing our people) considers that regular mass shooting deaths is a new norm of our life and no changes to gun laws are necessary. Our senate (the voice of the nation) rejects gun law changes.
In contrast, Australian government in 1996 thought enough was enough. They made changes that banned public access to long-barreled guns, assault rifles, hand guns. On top of that they implemented a very effective “buy back” program.
What happened after they did it? This.
You would say: “We have too many arabs, we don’t trust them, we suspect them of being potential mass shooters, and that’s why we need our guns. Look what they did in San Bernandino.”
It’d be fair to admit that those 2 people were indeed arabs. As well as Omar Mateen, who took 49 lives in Orlando shooting earlier this year.
But the data is still more convincing than race allegations. Look at this collage I’ve made using pictures of the mass shooters that have taken US lives since 1999 and tell me what you see.
According to data compiled by Mother Jones magazine, which looked at mass shootings in the United States since 1982, white people — almost exclusively white men — committed some 64% of the shootings.
Black people committed close to 16% of the mass shooting Mother Jones looked at, while Asians were responsible for around 9%. People identified as either Latino, Native American and unknown rounded out the study.
What I’m offering.
I live in Plano, TX now which is only 20 minutes from downtown Dallas where innocent officers gave their lives for nothing just a few day ago.
Ever since I’ve moved here I couldn’t ignore the abundance of gun related signs on restaurants and public places, open carry guns on people’s belts in grocery stores and assault rifles peacefully leaning against the entry doors of my neighbors’ apartments. On the 4th of July I was offered to go to a gun range by a guy I met at the local gym. I barely know him. I refused. I’ve never been to a gun range.
And then I thought that maybe to make a change you need to do these 3 things:
- Close gun ranges. I hear you booooooooing right now ready to fire up. But hold on. Tell me why do we need gun ranges? Most people say:
- To train.
- To have fun.
Why do you need to train? And to train to do what exactly?
Based on the data presented in the beginning of this post less than 1% will be able to use their guns to protect themselves.
Does it mean that you train to potentially kill someone on purpose? Like a lot of those mass shooters did in fact. Most of them went to gun ranges to test different kinds of weapons, get used to them and learn how to aim from distance. Is that your purpose?
Having fun part is not even worth commenting. It’s a weapon. Period. It’s like doing 100 miles per hour in school zone. Is it fun? Arguably.
On top of that, did you know that people die at gun ranges? Some people come to commit suicide, some to take lives. And some accidentally pull the trigger:
Did you notice something weird in this footage above?
Why in the world is that girl aiming at a man’s figure?!!
I thought it was disturbing, but maybe not all gun ranges were like that. Turns out, I was wrong. I did local Yelp search and looked through the first 10 DFW gun ranges that had pictures I was looking for.
Here’s what I’ve found.
Seriously? Man-shaped targets? And you shoot at them from distance?
Would you agree that it all looks like a rehearsal for a real-life murder? It’s a man hunt, not your “protecting my family” scenario.
So if I had to offer an alternative to closing gun ranges, I would offer to at least eliminate all man-shaped targets for sure.
I remember I was 21 and I came to a friend of mine to play some Gran Turismo, a very realistic car racing game on PlayStation. Everything I was doing there was out of this world and I held my breath at every corner my digital Nissan GTR was heroically conquering. I played for 4 hours straight. It was time to drive back home. I was still emotionally pumped when I got into my Honda Civic.
I crashed the car that same night when trying to do a slight drift on an icy road. It was stupid, but the street was empty. Nobody was hurt.
Psychologically, pretty much the same thing would happen to people owning an assault rifle bringing it to the gun range. They would point it at the man-shaped target and shoot for fun, as they would think. But our brain works differently. It picks objects and connects them into sequences. It would remember that a gun can kill a man and it would feel great. You can read more about how brain programming works here.
2. Allow people own only rubber-bullet guns for safety. Why are you boooooing again? If you claim you need your rifle to protect your family, then what’s the deal with it having to shoot lethal bullets? You only need to prevent an assault, right? Then rubber is a great choice!
But again, if I had to offer an alternative to limiting gun ownership to rubber guns only, I would offer to legally sell only 1 approved small caliber hand gun to the public. One type. One caliber. One model.
I mean, why do you need all that variety of lethal super-machines? A hand gun is lethal enough. And it would help you protect your family.
You know who it would have protected too? Those people crossing the street during a regular San Bernandino lunch afternoon. They weren’t killed with hand guns, as you know.
It would have also probably saved those 11 Dallas officers fallen under a hailstorm of bullets shot from tactical military weapons openly sold to anyone with a valid ID.
3. We need to introduce more technology into this rustic gun world we live in. Most gun ranges and gun shops remind me goat farms from the outside. Pieces of wood nailed one to another with paint written advertisement and similar low level safety approaches as well as full absence of any preventive measures (most gun ranges would rent out guns without running a background check).
Tech could change a lot.
FBI is already doing something clever by analyzing social feeds and phone calls, detecting marker words and trying to prevent crime. But there’s a long road ahead until AI will be able to do what crime prediction system shown in a movie “Minority Report” could do.
I actually think we need more hardware rather than software solutions at this point.
For example, gun storage trays with integrated GPS and beacon. You HAVE to have one if you legally own a weapon. You put your gun into the tray and green button flashes. Tray is connected to network and Police knows your gun is safely resting there and you’re not on your way to another gay club plotting to murder a bunch of people.
Your gun is out of the tray — police gives you a call to ask you why you took it out. You’re cleaning it? Ok fine, we expect you to put it back in there in the next 20 minutes.
You’re taking it to a gun range? Cool, please put your gun back into the tray, we will lock it remotely and track it via GPS until you reach the gun range. Tray will automatically unlock when you’re there.
If your gun is out of tray and you’re not responding to our calls, police is on its way and it will cost you.
Simple measures like these could dramatically decrease gun deaths in our country. But senate has to act on these changes. For some reason it doesn’t. And I think we all know why.
Because guns is a massive industry connecting hundreds of shadow organizations and prominent people speaking of peace and moral from big stages wrapped in stars and stripes.
That’s why we have to start with our home.
- Replace lethal guns with less-lethal ones.
- Stop visiting gun ranges, especially with your kids.
- Talk to your neighbors, get to know them better.
- Have a clearer feeling of what’s going on around you and teach your children to be alert.
Remember, that guns during piece time is a sign of weakness and paranoia, rather than strength and control. Hopefully, numbers in this article will be able to convince some of you, fellow gun owners, to drop the “pro gun” talk and start thinking about how we can make this country safer without buying our kid a Colt for his 16th birthday.
If you feel the same way — please like this post and share it on Facebook.
Plano, TX. July 2016.
