Nick Horbowy ’17: So much as mention gun control on Episcopal Academy’s campus and a fiery debate is bound to ensue. However, a winner will never emerge and generally those in favor of gun ownership are branded as ignorant, immoral and crazy “Fox News” Republicans. Yes, mass shootings and gun violence are horrible realities which must be dealt with, but they also beg the question: what is the best way to solve a problem with no clear-cut solution? I would argue that further restricting gun ownership would do preciously little for the amelioration of the gun violence problem, and, more importantly, the severity of the mass violence issue would remain entirely unimpeded upon.
The crux of my opinion hinges on the belief that bad people will do bad things, and that every society will have its angry young men capable of inestimably shocking acts of violence. That being said, American gun vendors should absolutely be required to conduct thorough background checks and mental health screenings of their customers. By no means should a known criminal or historically violent citizen have the legal privilege of owning any sort of weapon, much less a firearm designed to rapidly end dozens of lives.
Furthermore, I see no logical advantage in propagating the sale of assault rifles, high capacity magazines, nor any type of military grade explosive as they are simply too powerful to be necessary for an average US citizen.
Photo Courtesy of TheDailyBeast
However, Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, and I fully support law-abiding citizens who have proven themselves civilly responsible with the possession of semi-automatic weapons. There is no reason that these people should have a freedom taken away from them due to the faults of a few.
Many contend that to be an inherently flawed idea. They will say that if it’s easy for good people to have guns, it’s easy for bad people too, but the fact remains that it is and always will be easy for criminals to obtain guns. The means of obtaining them are abundant. They include theft, corrupt vendors, street vendors, or simply a criminal having his legally “clean” friend buy the weapon for him. All of these methods are virtually inexorable.
To reference my earlier statement, if a bad person wants to do a bad thing, he will find a way to do it regardless of the difficulty. Broadly restricting gun ownership does little to nothing in the name of preventing criminals from acquiring weapons, rather it merely exacerbates the criminality of those who wish to illegally obtain them, and makes unnecessarily difficult the process of procuring them for a law-abiding citizen.
Now, imagine if all guns suddenly disappeared from America. Legal or illegal, every firearm has completely vanished from within our borders and no one, even criminals, is able to obtain a gun. Would gangs stop hating each other? Would criminals not find another way? Of course not. But, there aren’t any guns, so wouldn’t the violence stop? Also, of course not. Instead of school shootings, there would be a rise in school bombings or school bus brake lines would rampantly be cut. Murder-suicides would happen with knives instead of handguns. The violence of man will not come to a halt and our destructive tendencies will have nearly the same magnitude, if only in different appearance. To reiterate, every society has its angry young men, and as a nation we would be foolish to underestimate their creativity and fervor. We simply cannot stop mass violence unless we attack it at the source: the perpetrators, not the guns.
The normalization of mass shootings and the murder of children are amongst the top most horrifying realities in our country today. Fortunately, there are methods through which mass violence in the United States can be ameliorated, but it is unconditionally critical to understand that restricting virtuous citizens’ constitutional freedom is an injudicious method to that end.
The issue of mass violence will never be completely solved, but to go in the right direction, legislators and doctors must seriously address mental health. It is more unjust for so many ill citizens to slip through the cracks of the healthcare system— left devoid of necessary medical and psychological help— than for the right to bear arms to be taken away from citizens with both good reason and good mental health to own such weapons. Simply making it more difficult for mass shootings to occur will not stop, nor even diminish them, but uprooting the problem from the ground up will stand a much sturdier chance of success.
An America with a systemic mass violence issue is not an America that any of us want to live in. It is easy to shift our blame to the conclusion that the sale of guns facilitates mass violence, but both logic and empirical evidence show this to be a mistaken belief. Our focus must shift elsewhere for the problem to actually be solved, and until we can finally agree that the heart of the issue lies in mental health, our children, our families, and our fellow Americans will continue to be killed in droves.