Every time there’s a shooting—specifically a school shooting–there are demands for greater gun control measures that range from longer waiting periods to mandated gun locks to stricter licensing to restricted sales. With all the political hacking and hysteria that follows, an ignorant public buys into the possibility that reduced availability of guns will reduce gun violence.
Just last week Ellen Murphy wrote in to the KC Star’s Letters page proclaiming that this country is “gun crazy” and questioning “How about keeping guns under some kind of control? How about background checks?” Blah, blah blah, blah. She ends by saying “Get rid of the guns and maybe we’ll have a chance to deal with these people’s problems in a more traditional way.” Ummmmm, Ellen? You’re ignorant. It comes from up-bringing, your parents are probably ignorant too. In fact, if that gene pool was not capped off after you, your kids are going to be in real trouble. Sadly, it took a stranger to read your ridiculous letter to bring this to your attention. But maybe I am being too hard on Ellen. How about we educate her a little, shall we? Or at the very least put it in perspective for her.
There are roughly 20,000 gun laws nationally on the books. And every time some nut job shoots another person, they break at least one of these laws. They even break God’s el numero uno rule “Thou shall not kill.” Even if you don’t believe in God, it’s still one of those faux pas one should know about.
Across the nation, motor-vehicle accidents, drowning, suffocation, and fires combined each kill more children under the age of fifteen than do firearms. Less than one handgun in 6,500 is ever used in a homicide. But I don’t see Ellen demanding cars being banned or demanding Mother Nature to restrict water, air and fire.
In 1993, The Brady Bill was enacted (another law) after James Brady, former White House Press secretary under the great Ronald Reagan. The Brady law requires instant background checks for prospective gun buyers (I believe this was a demand of Ellen’s). Basically when a firearms dealer sells a handgun, shotgun, or long rifle to a prospective buyer, a background check must be performed on that person in order to find whether or not that person is prohibited from owning a firearm due to past criminal actions and/or mental illness.
The fact of the matter is that gun accessibility in our country has never been as restricted as it is now. Up until the 1960’s many high schools had shooting clubs. That’s right. Kids actually carried their rifles to school in the morning, then turned them over to their home-room teacher or the gym coach. Students regularly competed in shooting contests for college scholarships. For most of our history (America, United States for those Rio Linda residents), a person could walk into a hardware store, virtually anywhere in the United States and buy a rifle. Few states even had age restrictions for buying handguns and private transfers of any gun to juveniles were unrestricted. How often have we heard of a father giving a new rifle on his sons 16th birthday?
With history showing greater youth accessibility to guns, why wasn’t there this kind of violence we see today? We will not make progress into gun-violence until we acknowledge the causes of youth behavior today, compared to yesterday. We must come to the realization that laws and regulations alone do not produce a civilized society. It’s education and morality that is society’s first line of defense against uncivilized behavior. Moral standards have been under siege in our country for nearly half a century. But an ignorant Ellen and public seem to like living in the dark.
