The President, and nearly every other sensible American, keeps repeating the same truism: the gun violence we see in America on a daily basis just doesn't happen in other developed nations.
It's another week in America, and another six hundred people are dead due to guns. A majority took their own lives, but still hundreds were senselessly murdered in a completely preventable way. I'm not arguing for complete gun prohibition. I get that that is not a promising solution. I understand that criminals would still have guns and therefore the point would be totally missed.
What I do not understand, however, is how our society and government defend guns and the Second Amendment so much, that we can't even pass laws that try to stop dangerous people from getting guns. The church shooter in South Carolina should have legally been unable to purchase a gun. This points out an obvious bureaucratic mess that resulted in nine lives being lost. Many other shooters, who should be barred from owning a firearm, legally obtain their weapons at gun shows and through other means that do not requite background checks. I get that increased gun laws wouldn't stop all instances of violence, but to surrender to these criminals because we can't win every battle is shameful.
According to the Department of Defense in 2010, nearly three times as many children were injured by guns on American soil than soldiers who were injured in Afghanistan (15,576 compared to 5,247). This is a disgrace. When the American homeland is more dangerous for children than Afghanistan is for soldiers, one can see that American soil is being turned into a domestic war zone.
The problem with guns in America is two-fold. First, we have to put in place sensible regulation that at least tries to keep the wrong people from guns. People claim that this is unconstitutional, which it isn't. All amendments are allowed to have sensible regulation. Americans enjoy freedom of speech, but you can still be arrested for unjustifiably screaming, "Bomb!" on an airplane. Americans have freedom of religion, but if one's religion tells them to kill other people, they lose their claim to freedom of religion. Likewise, Americans have the right to keep and bear arms, but when thousands of people die each year because of gun violence, there is complete justification for ensuring gun safety. It seems that so many people become violently defendant of their constitutional rights when gun legislation is brought up, but they fail to see that their right to arms is not unconditional. The Founding Fathers did not mean that any random person, with or without a criminal record, can walk around a Walmart broadly displaying an AK-47.
Second, Americans have a gun fetish. It has earned us unflattering stereotypes overseas. No other developed nation on earth has nearly as many guns as America does, nor do they treat them so nonchalantly. Other nations see guns as the deadly weapons they are, and have taken a wide variety of steps to ensure that they are not used to kill innocent civilians. Most other developed countries see annual gun death totals in the hundreds or lower. Which makes sense. These countries do not have love affairs for guns, and their governments enforce stricter rules over who may own a firearm. Of course, they cannot wipe out gun deaths as a whole, but their gun death totals pale in comparison to the United States' roughly 33,000 gun deaths each year. It's not unpatriotic to look at what other countries do right and follow their lead. It's smart.
When it comes to taxes, fiscal policy, health care, etc., there's room for healthy debate. When it comes to gun policy, America's obsession with guns and our government's refusal to act is literally a matter of life or death.
