Pull the Trigger on Guns

It’s a beautiful weekend morning, with the rays of sunlight dawning into your room as you wake up from a good night’s rest. You give your legs one last stretch and prop up your pillow as you gently shake off your tiredness and yawn. Reaching over the bedside table, you unplug your phone and scroll through your notifications, expecting to start your day off with a funny cat video and replying to those mass “Good Morning” Snapchats. Instead, what you see is shocking. 27 urgent texts from your friends, 43 worried missed calls from your relatives, and 82 Facebook post notifications that end with #WeStandWithPulse or #PrayForDallas or #StopTheBleeding. Your hometown, your tight-knit community, is no longer a safe space for hopscotch after school. It’s become known as a bloodbath on headlines across the world. It seems like it’s a terrible nightmare, a hoax, an illusion, a surreal situation, but for Americans, this is the reality we’ve had to deal with for too long. Gun violence is sweeping the nation, and incidents like Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, the Pulse Nightclub and the most recent Dallas Shooting have become the norm. It’s high time that we open our eyes to gun violence and impose harsher gun control laws.

Ever since I was young, I was appalled by the fact that people were allowed to have guns. In my mind, why would people even want to have something that's sole purpose was to cause harm? My 8-year-old self silently vowed that when she would become President, she would ban all guns everywhere, so no one could cause harm to one another. As I got older (and more mature), I realized that my proposal was impractical, but I still hold onto the core principles of my belief: not everyone should own a gun.

Whenever I bring up the topic of imposing stricter gun control laws, people immediately pounce on me by stating something like this: “It's in our Constitution." "Our founding fathers put it in there for a reason." "The Second Amendment lets me own guns." "You're not a real American." Whoa, cowboy, slow down. To me, being American is following your dreams and having enviable liberties. However, no liberty is absolute. Rules and laws based on absolutes never do too well in any society. Sure, we have Freedom of Speech, but that doesn't cover you in court when you yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Similarly, while I am not in favor of an outright ban of guns, I am in favor of very strict gun control laws. In fact, as recent as a month ago, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the 2nd Amendment does not guarantee the right to carry concealed guns, and the California law actually requires applicants to demonstrate a “good cause” to carry a weapon, such as working in a job with a security threat.

Still, many gun rights advocates reason, “Guns are needed for self-defense, so by taking them away, you’re basically leaving people helpless.” This is highly misleading; guns are rarely used for self-defense, and the numbers will surprise you. According to the Bureau of Justice, of all the violent crimes committed between 2007 and 2011, not even a mere 1% of people protected themselves with the threat or use of a gun. To further my point, the threat or use of guns are least employed method of protection. Simply put, guns are used more often to cause violent crimes rather than save someone from it.

Gun proponents then fire their last argument in their arsenal: “It doesn’t matter if people can’t use it for self-defense. What if a gunman was to commit a mass shooting right here, right now? By allowing normal people like me to carry arms, forget about self-defense - I could save all of us!” *sigh* Once again, completely false. This type of thinking is only practical in a perfect Utopian world, where unicorns exist and everyone is greeted with glitter bombs. According to the non-profit Mother Jones, NONE of the mass shootings between 1982 and 2012 was stopped by an armed civilian. That’s 62 mass shootings in 30 years and too many lives lost to count - and not one armed civilian stopped it. If that’s not bad enough, armed civilians are actually more likely to make dangerous situations more deadly. Jeffrey Voccola, Assistant Professor of Writing at Kutztown University, notes, "The average gun owner, no matter how responsible, is not trained in law enforcement or on how to handle life-threatening situations, so in most cases, if a threat occurs, increasing the number of guns only creates a more volatile and dangerous situation."

So what now? Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that guns are harmful for everyone, and if you still want to sleep with your firearm under your pillow, to each their own. But just like many Americans, I know that the path to better Saturday mornings (where you really can start your day off with a funny cat video) will only come with stricter gun control laws. So pull the trigger on guns.