Nobody agrees that “the right to bear arms” should be interpreted as “the right to bear any firearm you want.” It’s illegal to own an RPG, for example, or an anti-aircraft gun. Bombs, grenades, poisonous gas, tanks, land mines, incendiary weapons, etc., are all illegal because there are crazy people who would use them.
So, somewhere between the hunting rifle and the rocket propelled grenade launcher, we have to draw the line. Following the Uvalde shooting, we’re once again having a big fight about where that line should be.
For anti-gun-control folks, any attempt to move the line towards more control is a threat to all gun ownership. But that isn’t born of a love for guns, or freedom, it’s based on a years-long, growing mistrust of government. “They’ll come for our AR-15’s first,” as it’s commonly prophesied, “but it won’t stop there.” This crowd will rightfully cite multiple episodes from human history when a law was passed that ultimately led to a dictatorship-level loss of freedom.
I’ll point out that none of those examples come from American history.
Also missing from this side’s analyses are examples of other Western, first-world countries where gun control laws are much stricter than they are here, and their levels of gun violence (including mass shootings), much lower. It is illegal to own an assault-style rifle in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, for example, all countries whose mass shooting rates are far lower than ours. In all of those countries, guns are still legal.
After a British gunman killed 16 people in 1987, the country banned semiautomatic weapons like those he had used. It did the same with most handguns after a 1996 school shooting. It now has one of the lowest gun-related death rates in the developed world. In Australia, a 1996 massacre prompted mandatory gun buybacks that saw, according to some estimates, as many as one million firearms melted into slag. The rate of mass shootings plummeted from once every 18 months to, so far, only one in the 26 years since. Canada also tightened gun laws after a 1989 mass shooting. So did Germany in 2002, New Zealand in 2019 and Norway last year.
There are more than a few governmental administrations that imposed strict gun laws that didn’t spiral into some Nazi-style, 0 gun state.
It’s also argued that we have a “mental health issue, not a gun issue,” and that we should tackle the former before we do anything else. Amen on the mental health issue; only a twisted emotional state can convince someone to go to war with children and defenseless teachers. You’ll get no argument from me that America has a significant problem that needs immediate attention.
But how long it would take to develop a system that can identify the next 5 mass shooters, especially those who’ve shown no definitive signs of mental unhealth that warrant some kind of law enforcement intervention? It would take decades at the least. In the meantime, scores of children would be gunned down. If you’re OK with that, I can’t help you, and you’ll understand why I’m not interested in your perspective on abortion.
Another argument against gun control is that schools simply need tighter security. Sounds good at first, but when you compare the exorbitant cost of providing armed security for every school in the nation to the cost of simply banning semi-automatic rifles, you’ll understand my frustration with this argument. The level of security required to repel would-be shooters at, again, every school in the country, requires government spending that I don’t want to support financially but would be forced to.
With regards to personal freedom, what’s worse, a relative few people being banned from owning assault-style rifles, or half of America forced to pay for something they don’t agree with?
You’ve heard it said that banning these kinds of weapons is an assault on America’s deepest value. I’m lost on that one too. We are not a nation of laws, we are nation of freedoms, but when a bunch of people try to do life in the same country, you’ll get a few opposing opinions about what’s permissible and what’s not. Without laws, people will act in ways that infringe on the freedoms of others.
For example, at one point in our history, there were people who wanted to drive their cars as fast as they pleased. But that resulted in the deaths of people who chose to drive at a more reasonable speed. So, we passed laws that restricted the speed limit. We didn’t launch some decades-long national campaign to try and deal with the underlying emotional causes of speeding, we simply passed laws and punished accordingly. It was the cheapest, fastest, most reasonable way forward.
Whenever someone abuses their right to own, act, choose, whatever, in a way that infringes on the freedom of others, laws will follow. I don’t know a better way to define the word “democracy.”
Regardless of where you stand on anti-assault-style weapon regulations, they’re coming, as they should. Every time a bunch of kids are gunned down, more anti-gun-control lawmakers will step over to the dark side, the scales will tip, and we’ll make our laws.
Assault-style rifles and a few other semi-automatic weapons in the US will ultimately be banned. But don’t worry, America, it won’t happen today. We’ll get there, eventually, years from now, then look back on today and ask, “how could we have been so stupid?”
Between then and now, we’re going to bury a lot of kids, and all we had to do was pass one simple law, like we’ve done so many times before.
Shame on us.
