Gun Control Will Solve Nothing
Statistics from the National Federation of State High School
Associations reveal that, in 1999, 15 students perished while
playing in high school football games. This fact received little
to no coverage in the national media. Angry parents did not
parade into Washington, D.C., in order to demand stricter
regulation of high school football. Politicos feigning intense
anguish did not bemoan football's domination of most learning
institutions' sports programs. The large majority of this
country's citizens watched their favorite high school football
teams oblivious to the blood that soaked the pigskin and dripped
onto America's playing fields.
Conversely, when 15 students died from gunshot wounds during the
1998-1999 school year, as the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention indicate, the national media evangelized endlessly
about the evils of guns. Apparently forgetting that many of the
kid killers, such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had obtained
their weapons illegally, hordes of crusaders seethed that if
guns weren't legal and available, the school murders wouldn't
have happened. A few local governments, hoping to score
political points, filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers,
blaming them for the orgy of death and violence that seemed to
have consumed America's school system.
Why did 15 deaths related to high school football inspire scant
attention, while 15 deaths resulting from gun violence kindled
nationwide apoplexy?
Many right-wingers would simply answer, "Because the gun
grabbers want to seize our weapons, they will ignore any fact
that stands in their way!" These conservatives believe leftists
across America want to confiscate firearms for the sole purpose
of extending government control over the citizenry. But really,
the notion that an enormous conspiracy, in which common liberals
from all regions of the country participate, exists to subjugate
the American people, is patently absurd. Most Americans care too
little about politics and government to sustain such a
far-reaching plot. Instead, the average gun control advocate
honestly does believe that laws tightly regulating firearms, if
not outright banning them, would reduce the number of Americans
who die as a consequence of criminal attacks.
Gun control advocates amongst the populace acquire their ideas
about firearms from news personalities and government officials
who use guns as convenient scapegoats for this country's high
crime rate in order to avoid having to search for genuine causes
and solutions. Whenever an event such as a school shooting
occurs, the personalities and officials shamelessly exploit the
opportunity to vilify guns and the individuals who own them. The
real interest here is not to save lives, but to exacerbate
public opinion against guns. That is why the whole world mourned
the tragic deaths of 15 students from gunshot wounds during the
1998-1999 school year, but few people, if anyone, seemed to care
that 15 high school football players died in 1999.
The truth about guns is that they save far more lives than they
take. According to the Fall 1995 issue of The Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology, law-abiding citizens use guns
to defend themselves an average of 2.5 million times per year,
and only in less than 8 percent of these occurrences will
citizens actually need to fire their guns, because most
criminals will flee at the sight of a firearm. Of the 2.5
million annual instances of self-defense, 200,000 are cases of
women defending themselves from sexual abuse. In contrast,
accidental deaths, suicides, and homicides involving guns
number, on average, less than 40,000 every year. This means that
American citizens usually employ guns to defend themselves over
60 percent more times yearly than they do to kill, intentionally
or otherwise.
According to the August 28, 1996, issue of The Wall Street
Journal, states with looser gun control laws experience less
crime than states with tougher laws. For example, in states that
had begun to permit concealed weapons in the early 90's, the
murder rates fell by an average of 8.5 percent, the rape rates
by 5 percent, the aggravated assault rates by 7 percent, and the
robbery rates by 3 percent. Extrapolating from these data, if
states that forbade concealed weapons instead allowed them,
1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults, and
11,000 robberies annually would not have taken place.
The story of Australia demonstrates what could happen in the
United States if the American government were to ban guns. After
a nut conducted a particularly brutal massacre in the mid-90's,
Australia enacted laws disallowing personal firearms. By the end
of 1997, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, crime
had increased. The homicide rate rose by 3.2 percent, the
assault rate by 8.6 percent, the armed robbery rate by 44
percent, the unarmed robbery rate by 21 percent, the unlawful
entry rate by 3.9 percent, and the car theft rate by 6.1
percent. Even supposing that Australia's new gun laws did not
directly cause the increase in crime, the laws certainly did
nothing to help matters.
Because guns are not the forces for evil the media and the
government claim they are, no reason exists to forbid or to
constrict the right to bear arms for law-abiding American
citizens. Restrictions of freedom are only necessary and proper
when their design is to prevent individuals from harming other
people, which outlawing guns would not accomplish. Indeed, all
the criminalization of guns would do is leave the average
American defenseless against murderers and thieves who would
retain their own guns, in natural contrivance of the law.
Rather than inhibiting freedom, the United States should err on
the side of liberty, as per the Constitution, and allow its
citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights as they have
over the first 200 years of American history. (Contrary to the
notion that the Second Amendment does not grant individuals the
right to bear arms, the Supreme Court ruled in its 1990 decision
U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez that the Second Amendment
applies to "persons who are a part of a national community.") As
Thomas Jefferson, one of the most intelligent Founding Fathers,
said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending
too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of
it."