#MoreGunsLessCrime? Less guns, less crime.
By Season Ho
Weeks ago, a gunman opened fire at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College in the United States, killing nine people and injuring seven. President Barack Obama commented that these kind of shootings are becoming all too ‘routine’. Yes, indeed. As a Hongkonger living 8,000 miles away from the States – I, too, am becoming numb towards these news headlines.
“Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it … We have become numb to this.”
– Barack Obama
The numbness Obama mentioned is not because people are now apathetic towards human lives, but because these incidents are overly-frequent that Americans started to ‘get used’ to them. Since Obama got reelected in November 2012, there have been 993 mass shooting events in the United States, not including the Umpqua one this time. Almost 300 of them are in 2015.
The Second Amendment and its endless debate
Debates on gun control are heated up after the incident again, same after every other shooting. Obama has been trying to push gun control reform in his administration, only to encounter opposition from the Republican Party.
Like what the President said, mines are made safer when Americans are killed in mine disasters; communities are made safer when Americans are killed in foods and hurricanes. How to make a community safer when Americans are killed by guns? Gun control might be, or should be the best solution, but the Conservatives don’t think so. They continue to wave the flag of The Second Amendment and use the hashtag #moregunslesscrime online to resist any form of gun controls. They want a change on gun laws too – they want more guns.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted back in 1791. It protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms and is part of the first ten amendments contained in the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the right belongs to individuals but the right is not unlimited and does not prohibit all regulation of either firearms or similar devices.
Mental illness – is it really the cause?
As the US presidential election is approaching, candidates of the two sides are holding firmer to their stance towards gun control. GOP candidate Ben Carson said that if he face an active shooter, “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me.” By this he means that he can defend himself if he has a gun. “The shooter can only shoot one person at a time,” Carson argued. “He cannot shoot a whole group of people. So the idea is overwhelm him so not everybody gets killed.”
In fact, arguments from both sides are pretty clear. The Democrats want stricter gun laws, so that when less people own guns and carry guns around, it is less likely for these campus shooting to happen. Just take a look at Australia. After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre that killed 35 people and injured 28, John Howard, Australia’s prime minister at the time, led the drafting of National Firearms Agreement (NFA) which sharply restricted legal ownership of firearms. It also established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. About 650,000 legally owned guns were peacefully seized, then destroyed, as part of the buyback. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate went down by about 42 percent.
When the results of stricter gun control seems loud and clear, The Republicans insists that guns itself don’t kill people, it is the person behind the gun that kills people. Thus, they advocates more resources on mental health education. Let’s take a look at the mental health statistics in the US: A report in the American Journal of Public Health, published in February 2015, suggested that only 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings were committed by people diagnosed with mental disorders. When Donald Trump say that “this isn’t guns, this is really about mental illness,” is it really the case?
Even it is really about mental illness, like what Obama has said, America isn’t the only country with mentally-ill people, but it is the only advanced country that has the gun tragedy so frequently.
A problem bigger than terrorism
For every American killed by terrorism in the US and around the world, more than 1,000 died from firearms inside the U.S. during the recent decade with available comparative data. The gun fatalities cover all manners of deal, including homicide, accident and suicide. From 2001 to 2013, there were 3,380 American deaths by terrorism, and 406,496 deaths by firearms in the US, according the to US State Department. Which one, then, should you fear more? Gun ownership or terrorism?
I have tried to think of some new insights on the issue, only to find out that there won’t be any. Nothing wow, nothing new – the only way out is a stricter gun control. Even owning firearm might be one of the fundamental rights of the Americans, the obsession towards gun ownership is quite hard to understand. It is a matter of life and death, it is high time to stop the next episode of tragedy before it happened.
