Though Muhammad and accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo killed 10 people and wounded three over the course of three weeks in October 2002 while taunting police with written messages and phoned-in threats and demands, a more recent spate of shootings has again called to attention the ease of acquiring firearms in America.
A man was shot by an intruder in his home in my neighborhood on Wednesday. A shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas on Thursday left 13 people dead and 42 wounded. A man killed one person and wounded five others on Friday at a Florida office where he once worked. A seven-year-old girl was killed on Sunday in Louisiana when a stray bullet pierced the walls of her apartment and struck her in the neck while she slept. Yesterday, a man opened fire at a medical lab near where I grew up and killed two people and wounded two more.
I’m not interested in turning this post into a second amendment condemnation. There are plenty of responsible gun owners who have the right to “keep and bear arms” and I think it’s unfair to label everyone unfit for gun possession just because some people choose to shoot other people. But it certainly makes me think...
...That there are no effective measures to control gun ownership. Crazy people keep getting their hands on guns. People that are unable to legally purchase a gun don’t seem to have a problem obtaining one illegally. And when seemingly ‘normal’ people go postal with their legally-acquired guns, I have to ask myself: is the gun-buying process flawed in some way? Should people even be allowed to own firearms? How many more school shootings, indiscriminate stranger-on-stranger shootings and accidental shootings must we endure before we realize that it’s not necessarily a case of “guns don’t kill people - people kill people,” but rather a case of 'people and guns kill people?'
To be clear, I don't think guns should be banned outright. I also don't think it should be as easy as it is to get a gun. Can a balance be found? I wish I had the answer. If anything, the issue of gun control is serious food for serious thought. Eat up.
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The mysteries of the gun
First off, I could swing either way on this topic. I really don’t feel strongly either way. That being said, lets hypothesize making firearms illegal. In England, it is this way, and there are still many firearms in the country. More for the wrong reasons compared to America where there are many people using them for hunting, hobbies, etc. With making them illegal in the US, it seems like it would follow a similar trend as the war on drugs did, putting the remaining black America in our prison systems and not really addressing the issue of violence and addiction. With making drugs illegal, it made the drug trade and business a dangerous and seedy deal, involving more guns. If drugs were legalized, would it reduce violence? I know it would reduce non-criminal addicts from being placed in our jail systems which would in turn put the funds to much more needed places. So guns are legal, and maybe for the good, not even considering our right to bear and hunting and all that, but just based on whether making items illegal really addresses the social issue of violence. You could kill a man with a pencil if you so wished. Which comes to my subject of the mysteries of the gun. With movies, safety billboards, and social stigmas revolving around guns, we have become terrified to even pick one up. What do we think when we see a gun, we are going to die. I feel like the fear of a handgun is based solely around inexperience. My firearms instructor told us his father never let him touch his gun, he would hid it away in a closet, never let him see it, and told him to never ever touch it. So what did he do as soon as his father left, he ran in to play with it, show it off to his friends...with inexperience. And now he has become a nutty firearms instructor, haha. Kind of like my parents never giving me fast-food as a kid, and then as soon as I moved out, I got really fat on it. He chooses to teach his children about the gun, show them the parts, that it is a machine, dangerous, but still a machine with parts. He lets his children touch it, learn about it, and take it off the mystery pedestal. In turn, they don’t seek it out as soon as he leaves the house, because it is no longer forbidden and curious. I feel like the majority of our society are like curious and terrified children in respects to the knowledge of handguns. With that inexperience comes fear. I’m not trying to say they are not dangerous and they can’t kill you, but many many things can. We teach our children to look both ways before crossing the street, and to not touch the fire because it burns (sometimes we let them try to feel the burn so they learn). We see guns used improperly through the media, the cop that shot the mentally ill man, the gang member that shot a 18 years old girl in the park, or as torture devices in war footage and movies. This is our firmly built impression of this machine, and why it could never be used for any worthwhile purpose. This knowledge is based on inexperience. Like I said, I could debate both sides of this topic I’m sure, but as I continue my training and experience with the gun, the mystery is slowly disappearing. When once I was giddy, nervous, and terrified of the gun…it now is just becoming a last resort tool on my belt.
If you are interested, I would be willing to take you out to a range. I would recommend this to anyone for the above reasons.
By the way, what are your feelings about all the gangster rap you used to (still do?) listen to that revolves around gun violence?
Cool Blog btw
You make many good points, specifically that the argument can really go either way and that illegalizing guns would do little to solve the problem of gun violence. We all know how costly and ineffectual the War on Drugs is. Like I said, I just get upset when I hear about people getting shot for no good reason. I hate senseless violence. It looks like a huge shift in the culture and attitude surrounding firearms would be most effective. Unfortunately, that is much easier said than done. In the short term, I feel strongly that something needs to be done to make guns less accessible.
I left something out: I’m no stranger to guns. My dad had guns, he took me out shooting on many occasions, taught me safety, showed me how guns worked. I just never thought the guns were that cool. Maybe I’m a sissy. Maybe that experience and exposure to firearms is why I don’t understand other people’s fascination with guns. That was another good point of yours, the whole inexperience thing. Are you saying that senseless gun violence might decrease if people had more positive experience or exposure to guns?
You’re right too about the gangsta rap thing. I was way into it for a long time, not because of the gun talk, but for other lyrical and musical reasons. These days, all of that music just sounds ignorant to me. Mostly, I don’t like how they objectify women and speak with bad language and bad grammar. This is a completely different subject but sometimes I think gangsta rap is bad for the African American race. Did you know that predominantly white kids buy those records and feed that gangsta stereotype? Still, I think MIA’s “Paper Planes” is one of the greatest songs of all time – sometimes I even make a pistol with my fingers when the guns go off. Does that make me a hypocrite?
Side note: did you know Brendan got a gun? He went shooting with one of our friends and had so much fun that he bought a .22 soon after.
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