Violence in the media always seems to be a rallying cry for tougher gun control laws. While that’s convenient for gun opponents, it’s nothing more than playing on people’s emotions to “sell” their point of view. But there are, in my opinion, some serious problems with crying out for “gun control.”
The most obvious, and least talked about, is that the REAL problem is CRIMINALS. Criminals don’t care what laws are enacted, or who they penalize: they’re not going to follow ANY laws, period. And besides – anything a criminal wants to do with a gun is already illegal. We don’t need new laws to tell us that.
Gun control laws do more harm to the country than good because they make it so law-abiding citizens cannot defend themselves and others against violent crime. Gun owners have used their guns to stop mass murderers or other violent criminals in their tracks. Over 90% of gun violence occurs in gun free zones because the shooter knows that people in a gun free zone cannot legally defend themselves from a killer. Gun free zones are popular places for criminals to commit gun crimes because the criminals know they will face no armed resistance.
Clearly, gun-related crime has more than a single cause, and measurements and trends are subject to manipulation by both sides. For example, while decreasing adult homicide rates in urban areas with tough gun laws are cited as proof of the effectiveness of control, increasing youth homicide rates in the same areas are cited as proof of its futility. With such wildly divergent sets of statistical ammunition, one wonders if it even makes sense to prepare for this debate by arming oneself with facts and figures. At a minimum, it seems useful to try to quantify the problem, if not its exact nature.
So the answer is simple. Preserve our right to self defense, and keep the most effective tools available to law-abiding citizens to act on that right when we’re threatened. After all, the law-abiding citizen isn’t the one who will be committing crimes or heinous killing sprees because they have a gun. In fact, legally armed and properly trained citizens have at times stopped criminals from victimizing a crowd of unarmed citizens, and took action on the spot – long before police could have arrived, saving untold lives in the process.
When you consider unfortunate events, such as those in Aurora, Colorado, I’m firmly convinced that even one legally carried handgun would have saved lives and reduced injuries. And I’m also convinced that the people whose lives would have been saved, and the people not injured, would have been grateful for that defender.