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Gun Control Will Solve Nothing
By Jason Vines, Fri Dec 9th
Statistics from the National Federation of State High SchoolAssociations reveal that, in 1999, 15 students perished whileplaying in high school football games. This fact received littleto no coverage in the national media. Angry parents did notparade into Washington, D.C., in order to demand stricterregulation of high school football. Politicos feigning intenseanguish did not bemoan football's domination of most learninginstitutions' sports programs. The large majority of thiscountry's citizens watched their favorite high school footballteams oblivious to the blood that soaked the pigskin and drippedonto America's playing fields. Conversely, when 15 students died from gunshot wounds during the1998-1999 school year, as the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention indicate, the national media evangelized endlesslyabout the evils of guns. Apparently forgetting that many of thekid killers, such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had obtainedtheir weapons illegally, hordes of crusaders seethed that ifguns weren't legal and available, the school murders wouldn'thave happened. A few local governments, hoping to scorepolitical points, filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers,blaming them for the orgy of death and violence that seemed tohave consumed America's school system. Why did 15 deaths related to high school football inspire scantattention, while 15 deaths resulting from gun violence kindlednationwide apoplexy?
Many right-wingers would simply answer, "Because the gungrabbers want to seize our weapons, they will ignore any factthat stands in their way!" These conservatives believe leftistsacross America want to confiscate firearms for the sole purposeof extending government control over the citizenry. But really,the notion that an enormous conspiracy, in which common liberalsfrom all regions of the country participate, exists to subjugatethe American people, is patently absurd. Most Americans care toolittle about politics and government to sustain such afar-reaching plot. Instead, the average gun control advocatehonestly does believe that laws tightly regulating firearms, ifnot outright banning them, would reduce the number of Americanswho die as a consequence of criminal attacks. Gun control advocates amongst the populace acquire their ideasabout firearms from news personalities and government officialswho use guns as convenient scapegoats for this country's highcrime rate in order to avoid having to search for genuine causesand solutions. Whenever an event such as a school shootingoccurs, the personalities and officials shamelessly exploit theopportunity to vilify guns and the individuals who own them. Thereal interest here is not to save lives, but to exacerbatepublic opinion against guns. That is why the whole world mournedthe tragic deaths of 15 students from gunshot wounds during the1998-1999 school year, but few people, if anyone, seemed to carethat 15 high school football players died in 1999. The truth about guns is that they save far more lives than theytake. According to the Fall 1995 issue of The Journal ofCriminal Law and Criminology, law-abiding citizens use gunsto defend themselves an average of 2.5 million times per year,and only in less than 8 percent of these occurrences willcitizens actually need to fire
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their guns, because mostcriminals will flee at the sight of a firearm. Of the 2.5million annual instances of self-defense, 200,000 are cases ofwomen defending themselves from sexual abuse. In contrast,accidental deaths, suicides, and homicides involving gunsnumber, on average, less than 40,000 every year. This means thatAmerican citizens usually employ guns to defend themselves over60 percent more times yearly than they do to kill, intentionallyor otherwise. According to the August 28, 1996, issue of The Wall StreetJournal, states with looser gun control laws experience lesscrime than states with tougher laws. For example, in states thathad begun to permit concealed weapons in the early 90's, themurder rates fell by an average of 8.5 percent, the rape ratesby 5 percent, the aggravated assault rates by 7 percent, and therobbery rates by 3 percent. Extrapolating from these data, ifstates that forbade concealed weapons instead allowed them,1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults, and11,000 robberies annually would not have taken place. The story of Australia demonstrates what could happen in theUnited States if the American government were to ban guns. Aftera nut conducted a particularly brutal massacre in the mid-90's,Australia enacted laws disallowing personal firearms. By the endof 1997, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, crimehad increased. The homicide rate rose by 3.2 percent, theassault rate by 8.6 percent, the armed robbery rate by 44percent, the unarmed robbery rate by 21 percent, the unlawfulentry rate by 3.9 percent, and the car theft rate by 6.1percent. Even supposing that Australia's new gun laws did notdirectly cause the increase in crime, the laws certainly didnothing to help matters. Because guns are not the forces for evil the media and thegovernment claim they are, no reason exists to forbid or toconstrict the right to bear arms for law-abiding Americancitizens. Restrictions of freedom are only necessary and properwhen their design is to prevent individuals from harming otherpeople, which outlawing guns would not accomplish. Indeed, allthe criminalization of guns would do is leave the averageAmerican defenseless against murderers and thieves who wouldretain their own guns, in natural contrivance of the law. Rather than inhibiting freedom, the United States should err onthe side of liberty, as per the Constitution, and allow itscitizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights as they haveover the first 200 years of American history. (Contrary to thenotion that the Second Amendment does not grant individuals theright to bear arms, the Supreme Court ruled in its 1990 decisionU.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez that the Second Amendmentapplies to "persons who are a part of a national community.") AsThomas Jefferson, one of the most intelligent Founding Fathers,said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attendingtoo much liberty than to those attending too small a degree ofit." About the author:The author, Jason Vines, a lifelong student of history andgovernment, maintains Hypersyllogistic: Partisanship Rehab athttp://www.hypersyllogistic.com. Hypersyllogistic eschewsirrational rancor and partisan backbiting in favor ofindependent thought and respectful discussion. This article is © Jason Vines. All usage of this article mustinclude a citation to the author and a link to Hypersyllogistic.
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