First off, let me be clear. I am against guns, I have always been. There is overwhelming evidence that they make things worse, and overwhelming evidence that when they’re removed things get better. Take Japan for instance: they have the most strict gun laws in the world, and they have a homicide rate of 0.26%; in America, however, we have a homicide rate of 5%. I know correlation doesn’t imply causation - which, by the way, is something gun supporters should learn; most of their arguments would shrivel and die - but it is significant that a country with gun laws has, as per Wikipedia (google it!) around 2 whole deaths by guns per year. Yes, I know they’re much smaller than America, but look at the numbers: the population of America is about 331,002,651. The population of Japan is about 125,800,000 (all numbers from 2020). America’s population is thus 2.63 times the size of Japan. In the same year, only 76 people died of gun violence in Japan, if America is to be as good or better than Japan, we must have less than or equal to 76 * 2.63 gun deaths in 2020. 40,175 is more than 199, so Japan with stricter gun laws is absolutely smashing us.
Of course, a common argument is that if everybody had a gun nobody would get shot, because 20 good people with a rifle each beats 1 bad person with a rifle. An emotionally charged subject that most gun-supporters hate is school shootings, and they hate it for good reasons: given a class of 30 children, if we give every one of them a rifle, would all those children have died in the Sandy Hook massacre? Probably. Because kids aren’t good at using guns. Children, unlike many NRA members, actually still have their souls, and the stress of pulling a gun on a human being and killing them is too much to bear. The child who pulled the trigger would be scarred for life - and that’s assuming that the 1st-grader’s shaky hand doesn’t instead rip out the brains of his best friend. Bullying would be a problem too- the amount of effort put into keeping kids using guns properly would be equal to that of just making common-sense legislation and effective gun laws.
Recently, in Uvalde, Texas
If we were to implement more psychological testing for guns - performing lie tests for a person’s reason to buy, analyzing their behavior for sociopathy, it would become much easier. I know people only slightly older than me - still teenagers - who own guns. They didn’t buy it, their parents did. How is this legal again? I trust the person I reference not to go shoot up a bunch of toddlers, but what if he snapped and decided to go kamikaze? And they can’t be the only teens in America to legally own guns because their parents bought them as gifts. There are, of course, restrictions; but these are ineffectual restrictions. We can’t use metal detectors on people constantly, so if a high schooler who was given a gun by his rednecky but well-meaning father decided to kill kids, it would be a simple matter of hiding the gun in their backpack. Metal detectors at the school? Aluminum lining. C’mon, people, just because they’re kids doesn’t mean they aren’t smart enough to circumvent basic obstacles, even locks. Combination locks are incredibly easy to break - you just try every possibility. For a kid with a gun in their room, this is very feasible. It wouldn’t take an enterprising psycho-killer (qu’est-ce que c’est?) long to break it - only 10000 possibilities exist on most combination locks, it takes about a second to move the wheel up to the next number and yank the lock (so 10000 seconds at the very worst), and statistically you’ll only have to try 5000 on average before you get the right combination. If you use a tool that puts constant force on the lock, you can hear the pins clicking into place, making it even easier: you only have to move each of 4 tumblers into place once, instead of potentially hundreds or thousands of times. If you keep ammunition away from children, they can just buy some in some states: Texas allows anybody, quite literally anybody, to buy ammo for their guns. Anything that isn’t armor piercing can be bought by anybody with money, and does a gunman need to worry about little kids wearing bullet-proof vests?
I am ashamed, honestly, of the American population. We have knowingly endangered ourselves and our children, and for what? What do we gain from legally giving our kids guns, from allowing them to buy their own ammo? Is it some kind of freedom thing, the freedom to enable sociopathy and to enjoy the screams of your victims as they bleed to death, scrambling to get away from your bullets? Is it a base political desire to oppose those who would keep us safe? Do we just enjoy making ourselves easier to kill? It is absolutely horrifying that the intentional, wanton, and gruesome murder of almost two dozen people in a public school is not the worst that has ever happened. It sickens me that we have been reduced to squabbling over gun rights when children are dying in this way. Does “I support the murder of your kids” make a good campaign slogan? I doubt that, when the founding fathers granted us the right to bear arms, they knew the scope of their actions. They lived in a time when semi-automatic weaponry that can fire 30 rounds a second had not even been imagined, before it was conceivable that a single person could kill a hundred in a matter of minutes. I don’t think Alexander Hamilton hated his 5 sons.
Please, people, get it together. We are a nation founded on freedom: the freedom to live without the fear that a psychopath with a gun will kill you in the middle of History, the freedom from the evils of gun violence. We can rise against the oppressive pull of guns, we can enact progressive enforcement and legislation measures that will keep us safe for centuries to come.
Or, we can all be like Texas, stuck in a violent assumption that weapons of mass destruction constitute freedom.
My friend's blogs: Wizardwatch's overall site, Sawyer's blog (the .org part bemuses me), Luke's site. If ryleu decides to actually put something on his site, I'll link it here.