Point/Counterpoint: The Pros of Gun Control

Point/Counterpoint: The Pros of Gun Control

By Olivia Craighead

Sentry Opinion Editor

 

There is no one, perfect solution to the gun control debate. There never will be. There will always be people on the left who say to get rid of all personal gun ownership and there will always be people on the right who think that the answer to gun violence is simply, more guns. Both of these solutions are pipe dreams exacerbated by a deep political divide in this country.

In the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there has been a national conversation about gun control and what we can do to make sure this never happens again. The question is no longer about whether or not we enact tighter gun laws. In fact, on January 16th Obama signed twenty-three executive orders designed to combat gun violence. The question is now how tight those laws are going to be.

Here is where I stand. If you want to own a gun for your own personal protection, that is completely acceptable. However, I think it should be a long road from you thinking, “I want a gun,” to you actually buying a gun.

According to the National Rifle Association, a group that champions gun ownership throughout the country, in Virginia you do not need a permit to buy firearms. You do not need to be licensed and you do not need to register your firearms. There is, however, a criminal background check that one must complete before buying a gun. As long as you are eighteen and have not committed a serious crime, you are free to go ahead and buy yourself a firearm. The background check is good, but the lack of permits and registration is abhorrent.

For the record, I am just using Virginia laws here because those are the most relevant to our readership and, as the NRA is quick to remind anyone, gun laws are currently a state’s rights issue. Anyway, if we require people to go through the process of applying to a permit, registering each gun they buy and allowing for a background check, it makes it harder for a person to make a spur of the moment decision to buy a gun. This way, people who truly believe that they need a gun for safety will be able to acquire one and some dumb eighteen-year-old cannot simply waltz into the nearest sporting goods store and pick up a handgun.

I know where this argument goes next. Those who disagree with me will say that no amount of gun laws will stop tragedies like those in Aurora, Columbine and most recently, Newtown. That is because when someone walks into a space with the intent of mass murder, it ceases to be a matter of just gun control, it becomes a matter of mental health. Whenever these appalling acts of violence happen in our country, the news coverage the next day is all about how the shooter was mentally unstable. How the shooter was a loner or how the shooter never seemed quite right in the head to others. This is not to say that mental illness is a direct cause of violence, a vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent, but it is hard to look at these shootings and overlook the fact that mental illness is a factor in most, if not all of them.

Some people think that we as a country should ban all private ownership of handguns. Laws achieving that goal would be similar to those in the United Kingdom, where the right to private gun ownership is not guaranteed by the law the way it is here. Their strict gun policy is due mostly in part to a school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996. In that shooting, sixteen children and one teacher were killed. As a result, in 2010 the amount of gun deaths was 155. Compare that to the United States where in 2010 there were 31,672 deaths resulting from firearms. Due to the size discrepancy between the two countries, a more accurate description of that statistic is to look at gun deaths per 100,000 people. In the U.K., there were 0.25 gun-related deaths in 2010 while in the United States there were 10.26. That is 41% more deaths due to firearms in the country that allows firearm ownership compared to the one that does not.  Going back to that aforementioned deep political divide, I do not think it would ever be possible to completely eliminate private handgun ownership in this country. I do not think that any bill that would suggest banning the private ownership of handguns would even get out of committee, let alone both houses of Congress and onto the President’s desk. That being said, while gun ownership is currently a state’s rights issue, I do not think that a federal law requiring permits, background checks both mental and criminal and registration of purchased guns is not too exorbitant a request. Especially when it is clear that none of the gun legislation in place right now is doing anything. While murder rates are at a low, the number of all deaths by guns has hovered around 30,000 for the last decade.

It is not just gun control that we need. We need a better education system so that kids who live in the inner-city, where a high concentration of gun deaths occur, stay off the street. We need a more comprehensive understanding of mental health wherein a person need not feel like any less of a person for needing help. Lastly, we need a country that is not split down the middle. As a country, I think we all need to come together to recognize that there is, in fact, a problem and that it needs a solution.

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