Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
We have discussed the thousands who have been killed by guns in this country on several occasions on Professor Turley’s blog and we have seen some of the same responses from both sides of the discussions about reasonable restrictions on gun ownership and use. Some say that any restriction on gun ownership, no matter how small, is a violation of their Second Amendment rights.
Some of those who are in favor of reasonable gun control measures, point to the sheer numbers of women and children and men who die each day due to senseless murders and sorrowful accidents. Emotional arguments and reasons have been offered by both sides of the discussion, but yet not a single worthwhile National gun control measure has become law and the killings and deaths continue unabated.
To my dismay and shock, not even the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, where 20 small school children and 6 staff members lost their lives to an arguably mentally ill shooter, produced any resulting legislation that could be argued offers some relief in the ever larger numbers of gun deaths.
While researching this article I had trouble finding articles written on this subject after April of 2013. There were many articles, including articles on this blog from December of 2012 through April of 2013, but very little since. In light of the dearth of media interest since April of this year, I am curious about what it will take for the United States of America to decide it is time to stop killing itself?
In June of this year, I did find one article that discussed how little had been done since Sandy Hook and the article argued that the number of gun deaths since Sandy Hook has continued unabated.
“In the first week after the Newtown, Conn., massacre on Dec. 14, more than 100 people in the U.S. were killed by guns. In the first seven weeks, that number had risen to at least 1,285 gunshot killings and accidental deaths. A little more than three months after Newtown, there have been 2,244. The Huffington Post has recorded every gun-involved murder and accidental shooting death reported in U.S. news media since Newtown, revealing an epidemic that shows no signs of abating. The horrors cannot be contained behind yellow police tape or find resolution in a courtroom. For the victim’s families, the grief deforms all it touches. There’s the fear that the radio will play her favorite ballad. An airplane overhead, like the kind he flew, will strike panic. Home is not safe. One month, two months, two years, nine years since those fatal shots — the grief never leaves.” Huffington Post
The Huffington Post article that I have linked to above, discusses several shootings over the years and the damage it has done to families of the decedent’s and how difficult it has been to cope with their respective losses. It is always hard to lose a loved one, but it seems that losing a loved one to gun violence, misuse or accident is especially hard to recover from.
My intention with this article is not to argue the plusses and minuses of gun control legislation and to instigate partisan arguments as to who has the better argument about why Americans seems obsessed with guns. My intention is to discuss when will Americans do something, anything, to reduce gun violence?
The killing of 20 little children produced a hue and cry around the country and indeed, around the world. However, legislation to possibly ameliorate this epidemic of gun killings never materialized. You may blame Congress and its inability to pass any legislation on any subject. You can blame gun owners and gun manufacturers for their alleged stubbornness to back substantive gun control measures. You can even blame the conditions in the inner cities that seem to breed violence on the streets.
I submit the blame belongs in the lap of every American citizen. This epidemic of gun killings can’t be attributed to just one cause or one political party. It can’t be blamed on just one gun manufacturer or gun lobbyist. Only the collective pressure from an engaged citizenry can produce enough political power to attack the problem on all fronts.
Getting into politician’s faces, gun lobbyists faces, gang members faces and yes, our children’s faces and engaging and educating all concerned that if we do not take a stand after so many deaths, when will we? It may take reasonable gun control legislation. It may take reeducating our young people and it may take increased job opportunities to reduce poverty and the despair that goes with poverty. But without all of us drawing the line and saying that this country will no longer accept needless deaths, the change will never happen.
Stand up in your communities and let your fellow townspeople and city councils know that nothing will stand in your way to reduce the epidemic of gun deaths in almost every community. Educate your children about the dangers of misusing or playing with guns and make locking up your guns a reality. Let your legislators know that mental illness can’t be ignored. What do you think you can do to reduce gun deaths?
Can gun control legislation help reduce the number of deaths? Can Second Amendment advocates cooperate with gun control proponents to find a reasonable, yet effective middle ground? Are there any amendments to the Constitution that could somehow help reduce the number of gun deaths? Can America actually look to other countries for examples of a better way to handle guns in a civilized society?
Let’s hear how you would resolve America’s penchant for shooting its own people! This is a “war” that we cannot afford to lose.
There are no good solutions to this problem because guns don’t cause crime. They are misused by criminals and allowed to negligently fall into the hands of children who sometimes tragically shoot themselves or others. The best partial fix is cleaning up Tetraethyllead, a particularity neurotoxic lead compound whose presence is linked to higher levels of violent crime (http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline). The next step is to improve access to mental health treatment. The more notorious mass shooters seem to have serious untreated or under treated mental health problems. The fix there is to provide both more money for mental health services (the ACA will help) and make it easier to civilly commit someone for inpatient psychiatric care at a state hospital. Do these two things and we will see reductions in both mass shootings and in overall crime rates.
A last easy step is to provide age appropriate evidence based gun safely training starting in kindergarten. Approximately 45% of households contain a gun and its educationally negligent to not include this in the curriculum next to comprehensive sex ed.
If you want to change gun laws the easiest change would be to provide absolute civil and criminal immunity to gun owners who keep their firearms under their control or locked up. On the other side if someone fails to lock up or maintain control of their firearms, they would be under contributory negligence or comparative negligence as per state law.
I am one of many gun owners who take gun safety seriously but recognize that solutions to social violence have nothing to do with firearms.
According to SSDI records. the Ssndy Hookpatsy died the day before the
Sandy Hook hoax took place, and you would know that if you had bothered to study the case before you wrote the article.
It might have also caused you to examine some critical questions like who was behind it and why was it done. Instead, you will feel compelled to shoot the messenger with a volley of ad hominems, since you cannot refute the
mountain of evidence that proves the whole thing was a hoax. Just like the long list of other hoaxes that are designed to scare you into giving up more of your rights and accept the expanding police state we live in.
nick spinelli @4:38 p.m.
your over broad statement is true in some states, not true in others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state
but d.c.is off the charts
There is a constitutional amenndment on this, Bron. Look at number 2. Also,I have never seen gunnicide as a cause of death. Homicide, however, is death caused by another human.
I don’t see anyone saying “do nothing” and most are saying education, reasonable use of guns by responsible people and enforcement of current laws. “Little boxes on a hilltop.” If some folks don’t see the little “box on the hilltop,” they build one. Raff asked for suggestions, and he’s getting them. Too bad they don’t fit into the 2 boxes.
There aren’t going to be any sane gun control laws until the white male community is outgunned — so I suggest a voucher program for the non-Romney voting block for a free 9 mm and 20 boxes of ammo. The voucher to be exchanged for the gun and ammo after completing the gun safety course.
Reasonable is a subjective term. By using it to describe your own stance, but not those of your opponents on a polarizing topic, implies that everyone who disagrees with you is unreasonable. I do not think that is fair.
You also go back and forth between “reducing gun violence” and “reasonable gun control measures”. These are not interchangeable phrases. Nobody is for gun violence. But every proposal I’ve heard advertised for reducing gun violence, is actually a proposal to increase gun control which is not the same thing. I would considering supporting measures for reducing gun violence if I ever heard one that wasn’t actually gun control under a different name. I’m still waiting to hear the first.
Blanket proposals to fix gun violence through legislation will always fail. The problem is that guns will forever be tied to one very good thing and one very terrible thing: individual self-empowerment to defend oneself, and the ability to commit a deadly crime. Any legislation intended to only impact one of these, will inevitably impact the other. We already have a huge amount of gun control and it’s rightly tailored to the parts of the country in which people live at a local level. The process for acquiring firearms in Massachusetts is extremely different than it is in Montana. You could even say we already have a national gun registry being built in Bluffdale, Utah that records everyone’s transactions but that’s a different story.
People choose to pull a trigger for a countless number of reasons. Lack of empathy comes to mind as a big picture theme but it cannot be legislated against. A multitude of smaller issues seem to push people to that level whether its hunger, coercion, gang violence, drug side effects, lack of income, mental illness, despair, etc. Until every single person is financially, physically and mentally stable, and has reached Maslow’s highest level of self-actualization, which is to say never, I don’t see any additional gun control measures reducing gun violence. Legislators want to advertise on their resumes and beat their chests saying that they did something, but no effective change will occur without global improvements in empathy and all the little things in life that it takes to get people there.
“I agreed with everything that you said.
Then I started to think about the ideologues on both sides of the debate and realized that they would hijack any reasonable debate.
I come down to education and preventing mentally disturbed people from accessing guns.”
Raff,
I agree with you and Steve Fleisher. However, perusing the other comments give you the answer as to why no measures have been attempted.The people have been convinced that doing anything will trample on our liberties and make them unsafe. People need to be persuaded through education, but the money arrayed against that education makes its doing unlikely.
rafflaw,
There is no controversy that portions of our nation are criminal, and that they use guns to commit crime.
Or they don’t use guns to do it, depending on their style.
Kudos for the courage to deal with a controversial subject.
I mean, there is no controversy about the need to bring down violence, it is just that how to do it sparks controversy.
Gun control regulations do not work. We already have too many. Teach responsible gun use and gun ownership a very early age. Teach moral values about life to young people also.
Access to guns seems to be a common factor. If gun owners were properly educated on the use and safe keeping of firearms it could limit the access of guns to thieves, the mentally ill, or children. Gun locks should be mandatory for all firearms, in my opinion. Even if the have to be freely distributed by the government.
If guns were securely stored in lockable safes, closets, trunks, or desks it would greatly reduce their access by anyone other than the owner.
Illegal guns are a law enforcement problem and is harder to enforce, but I am sure more could be done without additional gun control legislation.
Beat cops seem to be a growing source of gun violence. I personally don’t believe police (aside from maybe SWAT teams) have any need or right to carry lethal weapons in most cases. Many non-lethal options are available: pepper spray, tasers, and rubber bullets. Other options could easily be developed, maybe tranquillizer guns? Police have a duty to enforce laws and protect the public, neither requires the use of lethal force, except in extreme cases.
We need to change the cultural tendency to violence in America through reducing the acceptability of violent acts and that legitimate gun owners are being responsible about eliminating access to their firearms by others. There is also the obvious need of better access for the mentally ill to get proper medical help and reduce their access to weapons.
There are alternatives to drastic gun control laws, and law abiding citizens have every right to own firearms, if they are educated and responsible in keeping them.
I agreed with everything that you said.
Then I started to think about the ideologues on both sides of the debate and realized that they would hijack any reasonable debate.
I come down to education and preventing mentally disturbed people from accessing guns.
We could leave things the way they are seeing as how gun violence, along with all violent crime, has been on a more or less steady decline for about two decades. Legislating out of emotion from horrifying but exceptionally rare events doesn’t usually result in good things (*cough*9/11*cough*).
That’s not optimum, but neither side is going to get what they want. Progressive/liberal gun owners point to our poor social safety nets, idiotic health care system, public education that punishes children who commit the sin of being born in a poor area, a devastating drug war, etc.
And pretty much any effective reforms for all of those would be blocked by conservatives; for that matter, a lot of them would be blocked by the sorry lot who claim to carry the mantle of the Democratic Party.
Pro-gun control folks push feel-good proposals that attack the symptoms instead of the disease, but fail to even affect the symptoms. Not to mention the difficulty of getting them passed and the potential political damage that even trying brings.
I think we just need to have a constitutional amendment on this and put it to bed once and for all.
Laws against gun ownership and possession do nothing to curb people who are willing to break the law by having guns. They only prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns. The whole premise of this article is that if gun restrictions were enacted they’d prevent gun violence. No, they’d only act to disarm law abiding citizens.
The deterrent effect is only on the person you kill.
Criminals believe they won’t get caught or will walk if they are.
Oh so right Nick. The short term and shallow fixes are supportive of the belief that we don’t want to control and eliminate the poor criminals, who BTW are not responsible for their atrocities.(ask your wealthy Criminal Lawyer?)
Will they demand all hands be amputated to stop the strangling’s when all tools used to maim and murder have been outlawed???(and of course only the outlaws have them)
Will they still give drunks and druggies repeated access to automobiles instead of life behind the non-drinking, steel, kind of bars.
Outlaw automobiles?
The element of people that are unfit to be loose in society need to be removed from it.
Maybe as police/govt increasingly use drones to take out violent offenders, it will have some deterrent effect. People will recognize that guns are not much better than sticks, when compared to drones.
Enforce current gun laws and make it so law abiding people feel it’s not just ok, but necessary to protect their fellow citizens by soberly and conscientiously carry weapons, concealed or not, to stop bad people who prey on good people. Violence is the worse where it is most difficult for good people to carry guns legally. This is not from a gun nut. This is from someone who has worked in law enforcement for decades, hardly ever has a gun w/ him, and would love a world w/o guns. But, I choose to deal w/ the real world, not one I wish it to be.
No gun control will stop the inner cities sub culture types from killing each other. The guns are supplied by the drug cartels.