It’s a sad cycle: Someone shoots a group of innocent people. One side demands tougher gun laws and the other side argues that those stricter gun laws wouldn’t prevent such incidents. Nothing happens, and we are back to square one until the next shooting.
This cycle is sad on one hand of course because innocent people just died, but it’s also sad because it takes the wrong end of a problem – mass shootings vs. gun deaths in general – to force a discussion about measures to solve it, when most of the suggestions would likely not help reducing mass shootings but the general problem.
Yes, I think the real problem is that we have too many gun-related deaths in the US, mass shootings are only a very small fraction of the total number. But let’s not get caught up with numbers. I think any death is reason enough to consider how we can prevent future deaths.
I find that a lot of the arguments on the uncompromising pro-gun site don’t make sense and are just there to end the discussion.
Below are some examples. I am happy for anyone who can bring good arguments for why I am wrong.
Argument #1
“If people don’t use a gun to kill, they use something else like a knife or a truck.”
Yes, it is just as easy to kill dozens of people with a knife as it is with a gun, right? Nope, it is not. Also, there are not over 10,000 homicides by knife-wielding criminals every year.
Even though you can’t bring a truck into most buildings, there are indeed still a lot of truck/car related deaths, intentional and accidental.
But while there has not been much work done on gun safety, there have been a lot of improvements in car safety over the last 100 years, which lead to an enormous reduction in deaths per mile driven.
Argument #2
“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”
This s a variation of the argument above. There is, no point in limiting access to guns because people who want to kill will use something else to do so if they don’t have a gun.
This argument falls apart when you start talking about the many accidental (and often sadly fatal) firearm discharges. It’s much harder accidentally to kill you with a knife than it is with a firearm. (You can try furniture)
Argument #3
“Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.”
This is basically an argument for everybody to own firearms.
Two points here. Yes, I would prefer to have a trained soldier next to me should I ever be in such a situation. But I am afraid that it’ll be likely some untrained idiot who’ll cause some innocent casualties in response one day.
The second point is that criminals have guns to threaten you because you likely don’t have a gun. As it is pointed out so often, criminals own illegal weapons. So what would prevent them from having full-automatic weapons in response to everybody owning regular guns? This whole argument is an argument for an arms race, which will lead to even more deaths.
Why can we talk about an Opioid Crisis but not have a reasonable discussion about reducing the number of unnecessary deaths by guns? Cars were not banned because too many died but were made safer because they were seen as a health hazard. The same will hopefully happen with a lot of other new technology. Why never with guns?