Nineteen more children are needlessly dead in America.
I.
On May 14th, 10 people were murdered while grocery shopping in Buffalo, New York. The very next day, another man was killed and five wounded in a mass shooting in a California church. A mere nine days after that, we are faced with the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook, in which 19 more children and two more adults have lost their lives to this country's ridiculous obsession with guns.
Yes, guns are the problem -- or to be more precise, the level of unfettered instant access we have to any and all manner of firearms in this country is the problem. No other country on earth is awash in guns like we are, and no other country on earth has mass shootings in their schools, churches, and grocery stores on a weekly basis. In ten days we had mass shootings in all three of those places. No other modern democracy has had mass shootings in an elementary school, church, and grocery store in ten years.
II.
Don't tell me that "the problem isn't guns; it's mental health." We do have deficiencies in mental healthcare in America, but those deficiencies are neither the cause nor an enabling factor for our mass-shooting problem. Mental health issues are no more prevalent here than they are in every other country where these shootings never happen, and deficiencies in mental healthcare are not unique to America. The one thing that is unique to America is the ubiquity of guns. There is no correlation between having a mental health condition and increased propensity toward violence, and blaming "mental health" for gun violence unjustly stigmatizes millions of peaceful people with mental healthcare needs and discourages them from seeking and obtaining help while doing nothing to address the actual problem, which is that we are the only country with more guns than people and the only country where this regularly happens.
III.
Don't tell me that "if we take away all the legal guns, only criminals will have guns." First of all, by and large, no they won't. The entire supply of black-market firearms comes from the legal market for firearms. If that supply dries up, so does the black-market supply, and it becomes (1) difficult to find firearms on the black market, (2) prohibitively expensive to purchase them even when you can find them, and (3) much more stigmatized even amongst criminals because the use of firearms is rare and the criminal punishments are extremely high. Sure, there will still be some criminals with guns, but they will be hardened, career criminals who are using them primarily as threats to carry out their criminal enterprises -- which is what zero perpetrators of mass shootings have ever been.
Second, that argument is bad because even with sensible restrictions on purchase and ownership of firearms, lots of law-abiding people will still have guns. They're called the police, it is their job to enforce the law, and they have extensive training and an in-depth and lengthy vetting process before they're able to carry those weapons (and we *still* have systemic issues with police misuse of force, but that's another argument). Moreover, the police, not gun-carrying private citizens, are almost invariably already the people who stop mass shootings.
All of that should be pretty much common sense, but if you really don't believe me, I point you to the statistics in, oh, every other industrialized country everywhere, where they have strict gun laws and practically zero mass shootings. If it really needs hammering home, in some of those countries most police aren't even armed, and yet -- guess what -- it is still exceptionally rare for criminals to use guns in any context! So it's just patently false that "if we take away the legal guns, only criminals will have guns."
IV.
Don't tell me that "if we take away the guns, evil people will still find some other means to do their evil acts." To the extent that may be true, that other means will likely be knives, and knives are far, far less efficient and effective as a tool of mass violence. Mass stabbings occur in other countries (but not very often in America, because the gun is universally the preferred tool here), but when they do, they almost always result in zero deaths or single-digit deaths. As sad as it is to say this, that would be a big, giant improvement for America over what we face now.
This whole argument boils down to saying, "because there is some alternate, less deadly means available, we shouldn't even try to remove the obvious primary enabling factor that makes this problem so endemic and so deadly." Determined people can still break into your house even if you lock your doors and windows; do you still think it's worthwhile to have locks? Yes, because they make it much harder to get into your house. Determined people can still steal your identity and financial information even if you have passwords on all your online bank accounts; do you still have and use those passwords? Yes, because they make it much harder to access your information. This argument is immedietely and apparently absurd when applied to any other context. It is just as absurd in this context.
V.
Don't tell me that "the only solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." There was a good guy with a gun at the shooting in Buffalo. Now there is a dead good guy with a gun in Buffalo, and nine other dead people there, too. As I mentioned above, the people who finally stopped that shooting were the trained, on-duty law enforcement officers, the first of whom arrived within one minute of the shooting starting, and who will still have guns if we finally decide to adopt sensible restrictions on firearms.
VI.
Don't tell me that "it's our rights, and it's the only thing protecting us against tyranny." A purported individual right to gun ownership unconnected to militia service is flatly contradicted by the text of the Second Amendment itself and is unsupported by anything in the historical record of this country from the Founding Era until the NRA made up the idea out of whole cloth in the 1970s. I could write a book on just how wrong it is to suggest that the Second Amendment was meant to codify an individual right to firearm ownership for the purpose of self-defense, how for the first 200 years of our history the idea of gun ownership went hand-in-hand with gun control, and how on multiple occasions the US Supreme Court explicitly conditioned the Second-Amendment right to gun ownership on the necessity of militias for national defense (in accordance with its text) before just conveniently ignoring all of that in the Heller opinion.
The notion that the Founders intended the Second Amendment to arm the people against the federal government is asinine. No government in the history of the world has ever intentionally armed its own populace against itself, and ours is no different. The mechanism by which the Second Amendment protected against tyranny was by obviating the need for a standing army, which was the instrument of governmental tyranny at the time. It worked not by arming the citizens to rise up against the government, but by arming the citizens to protect the government without needing to have an army for that purpose. The United States has had a standing army of some significant size since 1792 without succumbing to tyranny; neither has such a fate befallen any other modern democracy, all of which likewise have standing armies.
VII.
Almost without exception, mass shooters buy their weapons legally. They buy their ammunition legally. They buy their large-capacity magazines, scopes, silencers, and body armor legally. In many places, they carry all these things in public legally. Our legal regime functions as an enabling mechanism for these tragedies rather than an obstacle to them.
Previous argument about the Second Amendment notwithstanding, it is clearly and repeatedly established that the government can place restrictions on fundamental rights when those restrictions are narrowly tailored to be a least-restrictive means of achieving a compelling government interest. Our goverment has a compelling interest in protecting the lives or our children and our citizens (that is, in fact, the most fundamental purpose of government according to all of western political philosophy). Biometric locks are a narrowly tailored, less restrictive means of achieving that interest. Mandatory waiting periods are a narrowly tailored, less restrictive means of achieving that interest. Comprehensive background checks, limitations on magazine size and loading mechanism, and restrictions on when and where firearms can be carried are all narrowly tailored, less restrictive means of achieving that interest.
Yet one of our two major political parties continues to fight tooth and nail against any and every one of those things. They are spurred on to do so by a large portion of the American populace who, in the face of inescapably conclusive evidence from every other modern republic on the planet that sensibly restrictive gun laws are very effective at preventing mass shootings, are too afraid to admit to the rest of us, and perhaps to themselves as well, that deep down, they really just care more about getting to keep playing with their guns than they care about strangers' children.
Thus motivated, the spokespeople of this political party once again stand amidst a tidal wave of innocent bloodshed and offer "thoughts and prayers." Keep your thoughts and prayers. Thoughts without action are meaningless, and God is not coming down from on high to save our children. He gave us the compassion and empathy to care about our fellow citizens and put ourselves in the shoes of those who have lost their friends, family, and innocent little children to this needless violence, and He gave us the intelligence and understanding to write and enforce laws to protect ourselves and each other. Many of our fellow men have already done so. It is time for us to start trying something, anything to do the same, instead of just throwing up our hands as if there's nothing we can do.
VIII.
Mass shootings with more than 10 dead since Columbine:
Columbine High 1999 13 dead, 21 wounded
Virginia Tech 2007 32 dead, 17 wounded
Geneva County 2009 10 dead, 6 wounded
Binghamton 2009 13 dead, 4 wounded
Fort Hood 2009 14 dead, 32 wounded
Aurora 2012 12 dead, 58 wounded
Sandy Hook Elementary 2012 27 dead, 2 wounded
Washington Navy Yard 2013 12 dead, 3 wounded
San Bernardino 2015 14 dead, 24 wounded
Orlando 2016 49 dead, 53 wounded
Sutherland Springs 2017 26 dead, 22 wounded
Las Vegas 2017 60 dead, 411 wounded
Santa Fe High School 2018 10 dead, 13 wounded
Pittsburgh Synagogue 2018 11 dead, 6 wounded
Thousand Oaks 2018 12 dead, 1 wounded
Stoneman Douglas High 2018 17 dead, 17 wounded
Virginia Beach 2019 12 dead, 4 wounded
El Paso 2019 23 dead, 23 wounded
Boulder 2021 10 dead, 1 wounded
Buffalo 2022 10 dead, 3 wounded
Robb Elementary 2022 21 dead, 17 wounded
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Credit to Mr. Foote (a Lawyer friend of mine from my military days )
