By Ryan Stephens
It does not take much to spark gun legislation debates and after a recent massacre, everyone takes sides. Ask any person you know that does not reside under a rock and they will give you their two cents on the issue. With the pro-gun people and gun legislation supporters at each other’s throats, both need to take a step back and look at the issues and the information surrounding them.
Gun legislation does not need to be pushed. With laws being readied this soon, it feels like a knee-jerk reaction from people who took a neutral position on the issue originally and a perfect time from anti-gun lawmakers to push their agenda across much easier with strong emotions being felt due to the massacre being fresh in mind. Considering gun restrictions do not address the real problem, stop massacres, and harms the liberties of American citizens.
The legislation being pushed varies, with some laws plan to essentially neuter guns as we know them while others remain basic. The limitations proposed in some seem reasonable because they reduce the killing potential of weapons without making them useless (e.g. bans relating to high-capacity magazines). Regardless of the extremeness of these proposed laws, they fail to attack the root of the problem. If massacres are the problem, then the lawmakers behind gun laws look at the entire issue through a very limited scope. If they want to address the cause of the problem, they need to ask why these massacres occur. It would be hard to attribute the massacres to guns alone and a logical reason behind what made these shooters tick could be related to poor mental health care in the United States.
According to Washington Post, funding and manpower behind mental health care contributes to an extremely inefficient medical system. It would make sense for the shooters in most of these massacres lack rationality. Instead of looking at an effect of this problem, the roots of it must be addressed first in order for it to be solved.
Even with this in mind, anti-gun supporters make the argument that guns do help enable the people behind these massacres. Guns do facilitate the killer’s ability to kill more but to say that guns are the only weapons capable of massacring individuals would be a rather false assumption. In December 2012, at around the same time as the Sandy Hook shootings, twenty two children at a Chinese school died by knife. That is a number comparable to the amount of people killed at Sandy Hook. The reason to blame behind this particular reason is the response time of law officials. Placing the blame on one particular factor, such as the weapons themselves, limits the scope of other individuals and how they can look at the issue.
Lastly, anti-gun lobbyists seek to push restrictions on weapons in order to prevent instances like Sandy Hook or Aurora from happening ever again. However, the percentage these massacres represent does not end being of much significant. Of course, these events still end up being tragic but they are merely a drop in the ocean of crime statistics. So to punish every gun owner for this ends up feeling unfair because it would assume that all gun owners are capable of performing these murders. However, that would also assume that they all lack the judgement to make rational decisions. With quite a broad assumption, it would mean that all gun owners should kill every single day and this obviously wrong.
All in all, this gun debate ends up being just that, another debate. The resolution to it will probably end up the same too, with either minimal or no legislation being passed. The gridlocked legislators lack the ability to push the restrictions through for the reasons stated above. Ultimately, this trend will continue with every massacre and each time, the laws will get shot down.