People say you shouldn’t politicize tragedies. But you should.
Every mass shooting, like the recent Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., is an opportunity to have a conversation about our gun culture. For it is the rare occasion, despite the frequency of these horrors, that you have the public’s attention.
They also say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
But guns do kill people; approximately 87 people per day. To kill was the reason for their invention in the 12th century, and it is still their function now.
We shouldn’t delude ourselves. To do so prevents us from having an honest conversation about these weapons in our lives. To have this conversation does not mean you have to reach the conclusion that we must ban assault weapons or that guns should be allowed in parks and other public areas.
There are no forgone conclusions, but there are useful statistics to add substance to an emotional debate.
There are also tokens of conventional wisdom that proponents of expansive gun rights cash in far too often in the gun culture debate. And they are not legitimate currency.
For example, some say, “If you restrict gun rights for law-abiding
citizens, the bad guys will simply circumvent the rules.”
Wrong.
James Holmes, the shooter who blasted away moviegoers at a theater in Aurora, Colo. last year obtained a majority of his arsenal legally. After the attack, a New York Times article, “Other States, and Other Times, Would Have Posed Obstacles for Gunman,” described the difficulties Holmes would have had if he tried to assemble his arsenal in California or Massachusetts.
This information is reinforced by “The Geography of Gun Deaths,” a study of the correlations between gun-related deaths and various social indicators conducted by economist Richard Florida. He discovered that states with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence.
His research also discovered that mental illness had no effect on gun-related deaths. This is why we shouldn’t try to tell ourselves that it is only crazed individuals who kill.
The assailants in mass shootings tend to be sociopaths desperate for stardom. However, mass shootings represent a minority of the over 10,000 gun-related homicides which occur every year in America.
Data collected by Mother Jones for “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America” revealed the 142 weapons used in mass shootings between 1982 and 2012: 68 semi-automatic handguns, 35 assault weapons, 20 revolvers and 19 shotguns.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has said she will introduce legislation to ban assault weapons at the start of the next Congress.
However, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who studied the previous assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 said, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drops in gun violence.”
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence admits the ban was ineffective, but only because of its many loopholes, they say. Gun ownership has decreased, according to the General Social Survey, yet the U.S. has the most guns per capita, with an estimated 88 guns per 100 people.
Gun deaths have fallen over the decades, as shown by data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, yet mass shootings have risen.
We must reconcile our gun culture with these facts and these deaths.
