Oh yes, now IS the time to talk about gun control. Contrary to what the White House press secretary thinks, this is the perfect time to discuss this nation’s stubborn hold on the Second Amendment. After five of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S history happened during Obama’s first term, one of which claimed the lives of twenty young children, it is time for Congress to concede and say, enough is enough. It is time for our government to take a stand against the powerful thugs called the NRA and discuss the pervasive gun violence in this country. The United States has the most heavily armed people in the world per capita. An estimated 270 million guns are in the hands of American civilians, and 60% of U.S homicides occur using a firearm. The United States also has some of the most liberal gun laws; about half of the 50 states have adopted laws allowing gun owners to carry guns openly in most public places, and states like Arizona and Alaska allow people to carry a gun without a permit. States like Florida have adopted the dubious “stand your ground” law, which allows for a 28 year old man to stalk and shoot an unarmed black teenager under the pretense of “self-defense.”
People, the facts are right there. With the exception of a few anomalies, studies prove that there is a direct correlation between the amount of guns in a state, and the amount of homicides attributed to guns. Countries like Japan and the UK have very restrictive gun laws, and very few privately owned guns. Places like Canada and Switzerland have a lot of guns, but still have more restrictive gun laws than the United States. Because of this, the United States homicide rate is about 7 times higher than that of these countries. And these countries watch the same violent movies, play the same bloody videogames, and have the same bullying in schools. Additionally, the majority of the mass shootings in the past 30 years have been done by legally obtained weapons. James Holmes killed 12 people with legally bought semiautomatic rifle, shotgun, and pistol. Adam Lanza killed 20 children, and 6 teachers with his mom’s AR-15 rifle-the most popular rifle in America, and also the rifle used by the Colorado killer Holmes.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why normal civilians need to buy and carry around military style weapons. To hunt? Hunt what, the Terminator? And please spare me the bullshit about “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The most widely used phrase of the NRA suggests that a gun will cause the same amount of damage that any other weapon will in the hands of a deranged killer. Not true, in the case of the Chinese man who stabbed 22 children. Not one of them died, and only two of the children were badly wounded. If the murderer was armed with a knife, he would only be able to seriously injure one person before a teacher could tackle him or fight him to the ground. And it’s a lot easier for a parent to deal with an injured child than 20 sets of parents dealing with 20 dead children.
Yes, this is also a topic about mental illness, but mental disabilities are as much of a taboo subject in this country as conversations about gun control. Because of the massive failure of our healthcare system, there are not nearly enough resources to create efficient mental health facilities for people with could put themselves and others at risk. Instead, they are relegated to prisons, where the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater than in the non-incarcerated population, and our deeply deeply broken prison system is ill-equipped to deal with them.
Once upon a time, when the United States was established, citizens had to arm themselves against their occasionally violent Native American neighbors, and the tyranny of the Kingdom of Great Britain. During the American Revolutionary War, the British army had plans to capture and destroy military supplies in order to stop the American fight for independence. Spoiler alert: we won, and Great Britain is no longer our enemy. The Native American population has dwindled to a powerless minority that is too plagued by internal problems to pose a threat. There is no reason to cling to our guns like this. The shootings will keep happening unless we do something about this.♦
Kseniya Nadtochiy is a contributor for the Rutgers Review