In the morning hours after the massacre in Las Vegas, satirical newspaper outlet “The Onion” wasted no time in posting an article about the shooting entitled, “’No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” At first glance, this may seem insensitive—an opportunistic jab at the hottest headline of the day.
But the more I read and study "The Onion," the more I see how its words are much more deliberate than they seem at first glance. This article is no exception. "The Onion" has posted the same article verbatim, replacing only names and numbers, each time a mass-shooting has made national headlines in the last three years. This transforms the article from a cheap jab to a masterfully-crafted eye-opener. Tragedies like these happen time and time again, but nothing has changed. "The Onion’s" exasperated reposting emphasizes how tired Americans are of hearing the same headline over and over again.
But why haven’t we done anything? Why does the most powerful nation in the world blow everyone else out of the water on graphs like this one from 2013? Why does the United States have 210 times more gun murders than the UK and only five times the population? Why have more Americans been killed by firearms since 1968 than by all wars, ever?
As it often does in politics, money lies at the heart of the problem. In the first 10 months of 2017, the NRA (National Rifle Association) has spent $3.2 million dollars on lobbying (more than it spent in all of 2016). The NRA holds immense political influence that they do not want to lose.
The U.S. has always had a "gun culture." The nation was born out of the gunfire of the Revolutionary War and we trail-blazed our way to the west, shooting anything and everything that tried to stop us. Now that there are no Redcoats to shoot, nor Native Americans to massacre, Americans in contemporary society keep guns for hunting, collecting and peace-of-mind. Today, a gun in America is more than a tool. It is a symbol. Guns represent an individual’s ability to protect him or herself; they represent traditional American values of freedom, independence and self-reliance. This ideology is a big factor in why America struggles to enact a stricter gun-control policy, while other developed nations have had it figured out for decades. It comes down to the fact that we simply care more about our guns. The idea of the symbolic properties of guns encourages a rallying cry behind our Second-Amendment rights.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” These words have been around for 226 years, and yet they still spark both controversy and devotion of biblical proportions. Cries about the infringement of the Second Amendment frustrate me. This clause is an entirely outdated artifact of a primitive, violent culture far removed from our own contemporary society.
The amendment itself suggests that “a well-regulated Militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State.” Fortunately, we have a capable police force to deal with domestic affairs and a military for foreign ones. The last time I even heard the word "militia" was when wannabe army men marched with their guns through the streets of Charlottesville.
Furthermore, the amendment was designed with entirely different technology in mind. To reload a Brown Bess musket from the Revolutionary War era, a soldier had to pull a cartridge containing gunpowder and a musket ball from a pouch, tear off the end with his teeth, pour a small amount of gunpowder into the priming pan, push the rest of the cartridge into the barrel of the musket, pull the ramrod from its holder and push it into the barrel to squish down the cartridge, replace the ramrod, cock the musket and fire. This process took so long that it was considered a feat to fire three shots per minute. Compare this to today’s semi-automatic rifles which fire every time the trigger is pulled (three times per second for world-class competitors, one or two times for amateurs) and can reload a 30-round magazine in about five seconds. Today’s weapons are also much easier to handle and are incredibly accurate in their aim, especially compared to antique muskets. To make matters more complicated, for a few hundred dollars you can effectively convert any semi-automatic rifle into a fully-automatic machine to increase its fire rate.
The point of all this is that today’s weapons are much more powerful and dangerous than the weapons the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had in mind. Abiding by the Second Amendment is like studying hand grenades to dictate our nuclear arms policies. It just doesn’t make sense.
Another argument that inevitably comes up after every senseless slaughter is the adage, “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Let’s follow this argument in the case of the Las Vegas attack. What would someone with a sidearm or rifle have been able to do if they were in the crowd and came under fire from a terrorist on the 32nd floor of the adjacent hotel? Fire back? It would be impossible to even come close to helping, unless that person plans for concerts by slinging their high-powered sniper rifle over their shoulder. And if someone did decide to shoot back, what are police to do in that situation? How do they know who is a threat and who is fighting the threat? Do they let just anybody risk the lives of those around them to play the hero? If you think about it, it’s much more complicated that fighting fire with fire.
In a more general sense, small arms that are legal today are more-than-capable of the property defense many value so highly. What more could you need than a simple revolver or shotgun? It is difficult for me to imagine a situation in which these arms are insufficient to defend one's self, family and home.
The nail in the coffin for the “bad guy, good guy” argument is the fact that every other developed nation has strict gun-control laws in place. Gun violence rates in the U.K., Germany, Australia, Canada and other advanced nations show that there are many other solutions to stopping bad guys with guns. Namely, strict gun laws, strict background checks, conflict de-escalation in favor of shooting anything that moves and better mental health care. All of these methods have had better results than giving the "good guys" guns.
But if we make guns illegal, won’t criminals just get their guns illegally? Yeah, probably. I guess we should just make murder and rape legal, too, seeing as those still happen. Now that I think about it, we should just do away with law. Criminals will find away to break them regardless.
Does this make sense, though? Laws still serve a purpose, even if they don’t have a 100% success rate. Restricting gun purchases and enacting stronger background checks will make it harder for criminals to buy guns and still allow law-abiding citizens to get what they need (keyword: “need”). Plus, it might prevent someone without criminal connections, who is simply mentally ill, from stopping by Guns-R-Us and shooting up his or her school.
At some point, every argument against gun control breaks down. At some point, you just have to admit you oppose gun control because guns are cool and big guns are fun to shoot. At some point, you have to realize that a satirical newspaper speaks more truth than those we trust to speak the truth. But if your naïve devotion to a centuries-old symbol of freedom outweighs your care for human life, you might first want to go rethink your personal values.
