On Feb. 9, a student shot another student at this school, giving gun control advocates fresh ammunition to attack the Second Amendment. These advocates argue that guns are the root of criminal behavior in society such as gun violence, murders and other crimes.
Their main argument is that if guns are removed from society, then the tool used by criminals to commit crimes will be removed, and thus they will not commit any crimes. They cite examples like China or Japan as successful countries with gun control and Australia as another up-and-coming example of its efficacy, with their main evidence being low crime rates and low gun violence. “For gun policies, relevant outcomes can include, among others, the health of the gun industry, individuals’ ability to defend themselves, and homicide and suicide rates,” the Gun Policy in America said.
However, there are problems with this line of thinking; for one, criminals already ignore the law. Making laws that they will ignore just inherently doesn’t work by definition. Secondly, China and Japan have inherently low crime rates due to social conformity and high surveillance with cameras plastered around every corner that monitor their every move. These countries have low crime because they are a society of conformity and limited privacy; the government knows everything one does. There are issues with this route of policy however, as, when we give over our actions and the ability to monitor and view them over to the government, we are merely a dictator away from Nazi Germany or the USSR where every dissenting action is scrutinized.
Looking at more tame examples such as Australia or Britain, their gun restrictions have also failed to certain extents. For example, Australia’s gun ban is riddled with loopholes, allowing criminals but not civilians to obtain weapons, while Britain’s gun ban caused crime to soar higher, even though they managed to confiscate around 162,000 handguns.
In fact there are more examples of gun control not working; Chicago is one of them, with one of the strictest sets of gun laws in the country, including a government permit and thorough background checks before a person can even handle a gun. Yet Chicago is known for high levels of gun crime with frequent gang shoot outs and homicides. “In 2020, the gun homicide rate in Chicago’s four most violent police districts was 26 times higher than in the four safest police districts,” the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab said.
The problem in these areas is not the guns; if guns kill people, not people deciding to use a gun for crime, then there is no philosophical reason to prosecute criminals who use guns in their crimes. The problem in these areas is that people are turning to crime, and innocent people, who have been nearly all but disarmed by bureaucratic red tape and complicated hoop jumping, are bearing the brunt of the violence due to not being able to defend themselves.
On the other hand, there are countless examples of “good guys with guns” saving lives and preventing tragedies from unfolding in real time, like the example of Raul Mendez. Just a week after the tragic Pulse Nightclub shooting in Florida a man tried a similar action in an elementary school in Titusville, FL. Instead of resulting in 17 deaths like the previous shooting did, a civilian with a gun stepped in and shot the attacker while he still had 125 rounds of ammunition on him, saving kids lives.
However gun control advocates cite statistics and argue that these levels of crime must be related to guns, explaining what happened to Mendez as a stroke of luck or an outlier on a sea of red that the FBI statistics openly endorse. Yet the FBI does not track phenomena that are hard to track, specifically how many robbers were deterred by a gun or how many mass shootings were prevented because the criminal knew that they would be shot nearly instantly if they attempted their plans.
In fact, guns are used in self defense against potential assailants who don’t hesitate to take a life. Guns are a good deterrent against a criminal as, instead of having an unarmed target who is helpless up close or even at range, they will find American citizens who have the ability to severely injure or even kill attackers. “Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and three million times annually,” senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation Amy Swearer said.
Guns don’t kill, people kill people, and when we try to take guns away from law-abiding citizens we simply arm criminals. Gun control hurts law abiding citizens and denies the truth that unarming the citizens means unarming the non-criminals and leaving them out to the harsh world of crime. If it is inevitable that people will use guns to commit crimes, then why not make sure everyone is armed. “An armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity,” Marine veteran Clint Smith said.
