Did you know that more than two-thirds of homicides committed in the United States are carried out with firearms? Or that even though overall crime rates continue to fall in the United States, hate crime violence remains at a steady rate?
Yet, all one hears is that we, as Americans, have a right to carry firearms, so gun control can never happen – that would be in violation of our Second Amendment!
But would it really?
As many studies have shown, Americans seem to be dying from guns a lot more than guns are protecting them. This sounds like a public health concern – normally when something continues to harm a nation at a steady rate, bills and laws would be passed to help regulate its distribution so that the number of innocents killed would decrease.
Gun control laws would not be in violation of the Constitution. That’s similar to saying that the Clear and Present Danger Clause, enacted by the Supreme Court, is in violation of the First Amendment; but it’s not. If a regulation or clause is added to an Amendment in the Constitution for the public’s welfare, then it is not in violation of anything. Unless these gun-slinging Americans want to fight many previous Court cases on the matters of clauses to Amendments, maybe they should reevaluate what gun control means.
It doesn’t have to mean the complete stripping away of a citizen’s right to carry firearms; it simply means that their manufacture, selling, etc. will be regulated and monitored more closely. A person would still have the right to buy guns, and to carry guns, just as long as they were able to prove that they were of certain age and sound mind, along with whatever other precautionary measures may be passed.
Many people would still be able to carry guns, maybe not everywhere, but definitely within their own homes and backyards; however, if our nation continues to push these matters to the back of their minds, ignore the sit-ins for debates about gun control, and downplay the continued hate crimes going on around them, the Second Amendment probably won't have a clause, but the whole Constitution may have a new Amendment that repeals the Second. Hopefully, there will never be such a wide and horrific attack, but with these constant hate crimes occurring as of late, there may no longer be a choice in the near future.
Besides, don’t we want our nation to heal and stitch the wounds that our inhibition of the other and different have caused us? We stand for a country where we welcome all and all are free and equal, yet we also continue to persecute and degrade.
With the rise of Donald Trump, there will more than likely be more hate crime as he stirs the underprivileged and uneducated to a level of hate that this nation has not seen in a long time. He states that he will “make America great again,” but it seems more likely that he will cause us the exact opposite of progress. He would lead us into a large regression filled with fear and violence.
Gun control will not always be an option, let’s just hope we make the right decision before it’s too late.
