Another school mass shooting in land-of-the-gun America, another likely temporary surge of gun control ideas. Only this time, the school’s students are louder than ever.
It’s conveniently easy to simplify America’s mass shootings – blame guns, blame people, blame the lack of security guards, blame loose background checks, blame the cops, blame the under-funding of programs that help detect signs of insanity, blame video games, blame the government, blame Trump, blame the NRA…the list goes on. Suffice to say it’s probably a multifaceted issue.
But the issue that continues to be most polarizing is America’s gun issue and how to end gun violence. The following is a proposed solution to gun violence in America with heavy focus on what we know, empirically and logically, will not work based on past trials.
Gun…Control?
It is often spouted that by even having the gun control conversation, some of us are trying to take away your freedom. And those people would be right; I am trying to take away your freedom – your freedom to kill.
Control is a fuzzy, utterly meaningless word unless otherwise applied to scientific experiments. Control is an elusive illusion, right up there with safety. What does gun control even mean? Does it mean the policies and procedures surrounding what kind of people can buy what kind of guns at what point in time in what towns? It’s astounding to me that people can fight so adamantly for gun “control” while simultaneously contradict themselves. One need not look far; the evidence for debunking these pro-gun control claims makes national headlines.
The first claim is that raising the age that someone can purchase a gun will somehow lead to fewer deaths, I presume. First off, the general consensus is that the age should be raised from 18 to 21 – just a three-year difference. I suppose the reasoning behind this suggestion is that since it appears like a lot of mass shootings and school shootings are carried out by young adults under 21, then a raise in age should prevent these shooters from ever possessing such a weapon in the first place.
However, this is a weak, illogical run-of-the-mill, middle-ground argument that would hardly bring change. Adam Lanza’s mother was a gun enthusiast and collected guns. It should render no surprise that an individual with deteriorating mental health plus convenient access to guns equals murder, and he did murder 26 children at Sandy Hook elementary school. Adam Lanza never purchased the gun.
Not to mention, I fail to see the logic behind raising the legal age to purchase firearms with the numerous accounts of older adults committing such crimes, whether legally or illegally, in their 20s or in their 40s.
Another common claim you hear is that we should only ban semi-automatic firearms with bump stocks because every mass shooting involves such weapon. In reality, mass shootings occur daily. You just don’t hear about them because there can’t be constant news coverage on poorer communities such as a mass shooting that occurs in Detroit at a neighborhood barbecue. And those are often carried out with handguns. In fact, most gun crimes in America involve a handgun, so I don’t understand why we insist on limiting ourselves to this kind of ban.
The last claim I’ll touch on is this notion that stricter background checks would enable us to detect who the responsible gun owners are. But this whole push for stronger background checks, whatever that would look like, is completely useless if at any point in time someone who is deemed sane one moment can turn certifiably insane the next. Such is the case with Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock. His family and everyone who knew him were astoundingly shocked to know that he gunned down 58 people at a concert.
We all have our good days…and our bad days. People usually turn insane as time goes by. That’s often the nature of insanity. We can’t be monitoring every gun owner 24/7. If anything, the presence of the gun makes any situation more dangerous, especially when we can potentially morph into insane monsters. The takeaway then is that it is irresponsible to own a gun in the first place.
Biological Argument
Neglecting the concepts of destiny and fate for a moment, when talking about free will it is often pointed out that human beings possess the self-autonomy to choose their own path in life, make decisions on their own, and pursue their own interests or passions.
But what about our more impulsive decisions – that is, if you can even call an impulse a conscious decision? What if in the heat of battle or in a brief moment greeted with an unexpected, unprecedented threat of violence, our decision has already been made for us? What if our body, through its subconscious efforts, decidedly chooses for us how we react to external stimuli? Such an argument can be made for the biological processes that occur within our sympathetic nervous system such as our fight or flight response. Most people would probably agree that our flight response – our tendency to run away from trouble – is a lot stronger than our fight response – our tendency to inflict harm out of fear – but both are still very present.
An even more conclusive argument can be made that because of these predisposed biological conditions that have existed since the formation of human beings, access to any weapon, let alone a firearm designed specifically for killing other human beings, allows gun violence to occur seamlessly. In other words, if you put a gun in front of a human being who feels threatened by someone else, their “decision” to kill just got a whole lot easier thanks to their subconscious.
Again, what then does a responsible gun owner look like? Would we trust apes with guns? We share nearly identical genetic makeup.
Why people don’t bring up basic biology more in gun debates is beyond me. Disregarding human nature is a cardinal sin when considering how to stop or prevent problems that depend on human behavior. It’s only about half of the reason why we do what we do at any given moment – the other half of course being the nurturing or parental element of human development combined with environmental factors.
Incentivizing Teachers To Kill
I draw this conclusion in regards to biological determinism because when deciding if the notion of arming teachers in schools or placing more armed security guards in schools would keep students safe, or even safer -whatever that means – the outcome should render a crystal-clear answer: it’s preposterous. Giving death sticks to a bunch of animals, which is what we scientifically are, would only lead to more inevitable violence. As much as we’d like to think that we are these sort of psychologically advanced, logical, Vulcan-esq creatures, we’re not. And as much as we’d like to think that teachers can be trained to be sharp shooters, they can’t. And as much as we’d like to think that arming more “responsible” people with guns would not turn into some sort of wild west shootout filled with friendly fire, it will. Science doesn’t lie and neither does the violent history of previously armed groups of people.
Michael A. Wood Jr., a former cop in Baltimore from 2003-2014 and police management scholar, also provides numerous examples of how adding a gun to the equation of any setting intrinsically makes that setting more dangerous, not less. “Cops are stupid (with guns), wait till you see teachers,” he says. I will reference Wood again later on.
I concede that the arming-teachers argument has the potential to make some sense, but if you can accept the idea that cops are irresponsible with guns (i.e. shooting unarmed civilians, accidentally shooting themselves in classrooms, etc.) then quite logically, the training these teachers would receive would have to be a heck of a lot more intense, stronger, and effective than the training our police force goes through. Aside from the fact that such a training program probably doesn’t exist (yet), do we really want to incentivize our teachers to take a training program that teaches how to shoot the bad guy when there are papers to grade, lessons to write, and fear-ridden classrooms to maintain? If the answer is yes, then we must be seeking to revolutionize our schools, and that means more funding, which either means higher taxes and/or a redistribution of spending plan, and if the American government is fond of anything, it’s increasing the military budget and under-funding social programs, and if that’s the case then other sectors are probably going to be displeased with those higher taxes or loss of funding, resulting in one colossal destructive mess.
Home Defense And Hunting
Among all the arguments I’ve heard rationalizing gun ownership, home defense and hunting appear to be the more banal, level-headed reasons but only because they shouldn’t require something like a bump stock. If somebody wants a gun for home defense or hunting, bolt action rifles and shot guns should get the job done.
And as far as hunting is concerned, although I personally find it immoral to hunt and kill other animals, I’ll save that topic for another time.
Now, Michael Wood Jr. explained on The Jimmy Dore Show that “a gun is an offensive weapon, so you’re not actually trying to protect yourself. If you were trying to protect yourself, you’d be fighting to wear a bullet-resistant vest. That’s a defensive weapon…what you’re then saying is that society’s expectation is that we can have everybody have guns, and it’s the responsibility of people like me to kill them before they kill me or you, and that’s a really illogical position to have.”
Wood’s description of a gun is honest and supported by numbers that don’t lie: “an object that dramatically increases death.”
Of roughly 30,000 hand gun crimes each year, only an enormously small handful are indicative of home defense cases, and these cases involve someone living in fear and shooting at someone to protect themselves. The logical fallacy, however, is that the people we are afraid of also have guns. Once again, we live with a pugnacious mentality that guns, a tool designed to kill, will keep us safe and that it’s a good thing if more and more people possess this tool when in reality that just perpetuates more of the same problem. Just as MLK said that “hate cannot drive out hate”, the apparent answer to a gun problem is not more guns.
Are We Fighting The Symptoms Of Gun Violence Or The Causes?
Right now we are constantly thinking of ways to stop bad people when we should be focusing on how people were driven to be bad in the first place – a pacifist approach commonly referred to as prevention before, not intervention after.
The home defense argument is attacking the symptoms of violence, not the causes of violence. It says that I need a gun because you have a gun – a model of circular logic that only perpetuates gun violence even more.
Fighting symptoms versus causes looks something like this: Imagine you have the flu and snot trickles down your nose. Fighting the symptoms of the flu would be if you wiped the snot away with a Kleenex. Sure, you’ve gotten rid of the mucus, but only temporarily because you didn’t take medicine that would alleviate the flu. Or an answer that addresses the root problem even more would be to figure out what allowed you to catch the infection or bacteria in the first place (most likely, it’s because you were around someone else who also had the flu).
But when we look at crime, we see that the number one correlation to violent crime is lack of resources, especially lead poisoning. Therefore, it would seem that if we offer a remedy for lead poisoning and create healthier environments and neighborhoods for poor communities, violence should decline. This is addressing the cause of violence.
What Did The Obfuscating Founding Fathers Intend?
You would think that a document as important as the United States constitution wouldn’t come with as much grey area as it seemingly does to this day. And yet, the founding fathers were smart in that they allowed the constitution to be amendable, something we are long overdue to at least attempt.
As far as leaning on the 2nd amendment is concerned, the world is drastically different from the 1700s especially with the evolvement of technology and weaponry. You’ve probably heard that before. What people could probably afford to consider more is what the phrase “well-regulated militia” means in the 2nd amendment. American citizens commonly interpret this amendment as meaning that they have a right to a firearm but “well-regulated militia” implies that it is not the right of the people to bear arms but the right of the people of the state such as the national guard. It’s about the state being able to defend themselves against the federal government in the event of rising national totalitarianism or something of the sort.
Another interpretation of the 2nd amendment we may extol is that we have a right to own a gun to defend ourselves in the event that our government turns on us and becomes tyrannical. The funny thing is, our government has already enforced tyrannical, oppressive, Orwellian tactics – anything from police wearing body cameras and altering the footage to locking people up and punishing them – but that’s a little off topic for now.
My main point, however, is that you don’t need a gun or any weapon for that matter to fight back and overthrow an oppressive regime.
Srđa Popović helped create the Otpor! Movement that utilized literally Lego men and rice pudding among other nonviolent techniques and methods to topple Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1990s. That was accomplished by just a bunch of college students who enjoyed drinking and listening to rock music.
Numerous governments/dictatorships have been peacefully reformed by its citizens, increasingly so, over the past 40 years including Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, General Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland, Apartheid in South Africa, and Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia. No gun needed, just good old-fashioned nonviolent civil disobedience and according to Popović, a touch of humor in some instances.
Congress couldn’t even ban slavery until the early 1800s. As U.S. veteran peace activist Paul K. Chappell addresses in his books and speeches, we have come a long way in achieving justice and freedom for all, but we still have a long way to go. We should always be thinking about what we can improve today to present a more humane life for people in the future. Futuristic thinking involves asking questions like, what are we doing in 2018 that people 100 years from now are laughing at because they view it as such an easy problem to fix? For most of us, the idea of slavery seems preposterous on a number of levels, and yet at one point, very few people would have objected to the notion of slave ownership. Guns are the modern-day slavery in this respect.
So, what does it really mean to be a “responsible gun owner”? If you can’t escape your biological wiring, subconscious decision-making, occasional or frequent days of poor mental health, and tendency to blame people rather than address the underlying causes of violence, then is there really such a thing?
Where To Start
There is a simpler option that no matter how naïve, improbable, unpragmatic, displeasuring, or un-American it might seem is highly likely, perhaps even guaranteed, to work in the long run and that is to ban and destroy all guns in the country.
Call the swat team. Scoff your face. Ready your snowflake insults for me. That is my big selling point in a nutshell.
Furthermore, we must focus more on improving historically crime-ridden communities and building a strong foundation via educating, particularly our youth, the idea that a world without guns is no longer the insane thought, but the sane thought.
I think we know deep down that gun violence in America can’t get any worse if we stay on our projected course.
A lot of people want to compare banning guns to banning knives or cars, but those are false equivalencies. A car is designed to transport passengers. A knife is meant to chop food, assist in carpentry, or even unlock doors. If a gun had any other function other than to kill then this would be a sounder comparison.
Australia endured one mass shooting, and that was enough to ban assault weapons and destroy guns. There hasn’t been a worldwide headline of a mass shooting in Australia since. A counter point you might hear is that criminals are still committing crimes with guns in countries like Australia, but since criminals are always the ones who commit crimes, I’m not sure if that counter point amounts to anything. Furthermore, there is a difference between mass shootings and other gun-related crimes.
Guns Cannot Be The Future
I didn’t reach my conclusion over night; I’ve had to in some cases literally run down activists, teachers, and public speakers to learn what experienced, knowledgeable, experts think of this matter with their anecdotal or scientific points.
Furthermore, I realize the sacrifice I’m proposing, and I do feel bad if it is a hard pill to swallow or if my writing conveys a sense of apathy towards those who love their guns. But I’ve personally made sacrifices that have been extremely difficult for me as well. I used to be the biggest meat-eater, but I no longer consume meat for purposes of reducing cruelty in the world, slowing down global warming, and decreasing world hunger. I used to love football but am having severe second thoughts regarding the nature of the sport and various aspects surrounding the NFL.
The notion of no thing or no person ever staying the same dates back to as early as the days of Socrates. Slavery is no longer the norm; it’s time we start viewing the existence of guns the same way.
A Peace Of Sully 