Common Sense vs Gun Control Part 3

Mass shootings, for whatever reason, are some of the most destructive attacks upon society one can imagine. A combination of shock-and-awe power and terrorism, they are extremely effective at getting people to change their minds about issues of safety and security. However, instead buying guns for our teachers and training civilians in the proper use of firearms, our leaders react to these tragedies by tightening restrictions and security procedures. The evidence provided in support of tighter restrictions claims that criminals who engage in mass-shootings often obtain their weapons legally. While in some cases this is true, most criminals obtain their weapons from whatever sources available; illegal, legal, or even homemade (it's amazing what kind of inventive ammunition can be created by one human being hellbent on killing another).

After a string of mass-shootings in 2013, US Attorney General Eric Holder called for an increase in spending to help give police officers the "tools and guidance they need to effectively respond to active shooter incidents". He also advocates the use of "smart guns" and further restrictions on assault weapons. None of these went over very well in the public eye; we don't have the money to spend, the time to waste, and smart guns are an invasion of privacy.

Frontline: Hot Guns: How Criminals Get Their Guns

And considering Holder was the many who effectively gave hundreds of firearms to Mexican drug cartels in a botched operation to track the spread and proliferation of such weaponry among gangs, he's not the man I would trust to be an expert on firearms or gun-control. The government can't be trusted to properly track weapons they themselves put in play, so what makes anyone think they can adequately protect people at home?

But I digress. What matters is the criminals who do these terrible deeds already have guns and have a means of getting them from less than reputable sources. It doesn't matter where they got them from, how difficult it was, or what purchasing procedures they went through to acquire them, the question is how we as citizens respond to such threats? After all, is every citizen of the United States responsible to for the actions of one person? Do store owners and private collectors deserve to be punished or have their property taken away out of fear? Let's talk about fear for a moment:

The average number of deaths in a mass-shooting in the United States is 14.3 before the police can stop the shooter(s). That's over 14 people dead in seconds. The average number of deaths in a shooting when even one person is armed is 2.3 (statistic usually includes the shooter), less than 16% when compared to the average mass-shooting when not a single person has a weapon capable of stopping them. Curiously, almost all mass-shootings in the United States are committed in States which have banned guns. Mass-shootings rarely happen in States which allow them because the shooter usually ends up being taken down by a good Samaritan and it's classified as a regular shooting or ineffectual rampage.

Read More: Auditing Shooting Rampage Statistics, by Davi Parker

By nature, criminals don't obey the law. However, law-abiding citizens don't want to get arrested for disobedience, so instead of having the weapons they need to defend themselves, they end up getting shot because the state decided for them, in a country which celebrates freedom above all else, that they are not worthy to carry a weapon and use it in defense of their lives and their families.

I won't deny that guns are the end of so many tragedies in our society, from spousal disagreements, children accidentally shooting themselves or others, arguments gone wrong; but for every tragedy, you can point out a dozen instances where guns have helped people. They've helped stop rapers, robbers, rampages, animal attacks, and dozens of other instances where people have successfully defended themselves and others. Again, and I cannot stress this enough: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Guns are tools, inanimate objects until someone uses them, for good or ill. And when the time comes for me to protect myself, I'd rather have a gun than a cellphone.