RE: Guns don’t cause violence, Feb. 25 – March 2, 2016.
With every shooting, there is renewed vigour in the gun control debate. A recent letter in The Charlatan argued gun control does little to stop violence. That’s simply not true. Guns in the hands of people who aren’t trained can and do cause enormous amounts of carnage.
You can suggest violent people will find a way to hurt others no matter what, but it’s obvious guns make killing people a lot easier. Yeah, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but it’s a lot easier to make a sweater with knitting needles, just as it’s easier to kill people if you have access to a gun.
And that’s the entire point of this debate. Guns are tools designed to inflict massive amounts of damage on their targets. They have no other purpose. Do they have a function in society? Yes, of course. Rural and Indigenous communities often need them to protect themselves from wild animals or to hunt for food.
If you are a law-abiding citizen, then there’s no reason to be afraid of a few more measures to make sure your guns don’t fall into the hands of people that will use them illegally.
Countries that successfully maintain high gun ownership rates with low gun homicide rates, as mentioned in the aforementioned letter, are countries like Norway and Denmark. These are countries with mandatory military service—countries that train their citizens rigorously in how and when to use firearms. They are not untrained, unchecked citizens running to the store to get guns.
Looking to the United States for examples of the effectiveness of gun control is flawed. If you do not account for suicides, many states with high gun control rates still have high gun murder rates, but the reverse also applies. States with low gun control also have the highest rates of gun murder, like Louisiana and Mississippi.
Furthermore, there are no laws to stop Americans from buying guns in low gun control states, and then crossing state lines with their weapons, and studies show this is exactly what ends up happening. The US already has 88 guns for every 100 people, so it’s ridiculous to say adding more guns to the equation is the solution to gun violence.
And despite the fact that mass shootings have occurred in places where there have been armed individuals including a military base (Fort Hood), and a school with an armed guard (Columbine), no mass shootings in the past 30 years have been stopped by an armed civilian.
Disregarding the fact that we (thankfully) live in Canada and the US Constitution doesn’t apply to us, everyone seems to disregard a fundamental section of the Second Amendment which states: “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.”
When the Second Amendment was written, the US didn’t have a national army. They were also worried about being attacked by Britain, so the states were allowed to have militias—not random citizens waving guns around. Society has changed since their days. And frankly, if the American government did decide to one day turn on its citizens, the might of its military is so strong that no amount of assault rifles is going to protect anyone from hydrogen bombs and drones anyways.
Contrary to popular belief, there are no absolute rights. The Constitution can be changed—nearly every amendment in the American constitution already has limitations built in. For example, the Fourth Amendment—which protects Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure”—can be violated if an officer of the law thinks there is imminent danger. In Canada, we have a Limitations clause built into the Charter that states every single Charter right can be limited if it passes a series of tests. Arguing that putting limitations on the Second Amendment is the first step towards society’s downfall ignores the fact that limitations already exist.
The aforementioned pro-gun rights letter also argues cars cause more deaths than guns, but no one is fighting to get rid of them. Disregarding the fact that cars have a purpose beyond killing, no one is fighting to totally get rid of guns either. But it’s a lot harder—at least in the US—to legally operate a car than to legally operate a gun.
You must pass a series of tests and regulations, and both license yourself and register your vehicle in order to drive a car, and there are limitations on what you can do with it and how fast you can go in order to legally be using one. As well, traffic laws are constantly updated if investigators find that many deaths are occurring in similar circumstances.
Yet for some reason, despite the fact that the majority of Americans support increasing gun control measures, nothing happens to make it safer for people to own guns and every few weeks, we hear of another mass shooting. Most mass shootings are perpetrated with legal weapons, so laws need to change to make it harder to get them.
When a mass shooting killed 35 people in Australia, their government bought back and subsequently destroyed 650,000 automatic and semi-automatic weapons. In the 10 years afterwards, there was a 59 per cent drop in gun-homicide rates without a corresponding rise to other homicide rates, and they haven’t had a public mass-shooting since.
America is the only developed country that doesn’t license gun owners across the board, and it, Canada, and New Zealand are the only countries that don’t register guns across the board. It’s time to change that.
Wanting yourself, your family, and your fellow citizens to be as safe as possible is not fascism, and it is not the first step towards a totalitarian regime—nor is it cowardice. It’s having compassion and a heart, and doing what you can to reduce the chances of harm.
