Gun Control and the Dangerous Illusion of Safety

The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut left twenty children, six adults, and the shooter himself dead. Adam Lanza, the young shooter, left a grieving nation, a shattered town, and a weeping President in his wake.

This incident was the latest massacre in the past couple years in which terrible incidents such as this occurred with seeming greater frequency than in years past. Immediately, people across the nation cried out for answers and action. Such reactions have become the norm as current events are sent instantly to our phones, computers, and televisions literally the minute they occur. Some of the loudest and most prominent voices in this most recent outcry have been calling for greater restrictions on private ownership of firearms in America. Such calls for more gun control are commonplace after such horrific incidents like the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy, but this most recent example seems to be prompting President Obama, Congress, and state governors to take action.

For proponents of gun control, the most common argument that they use (which to them is unquestionable) is that fewer guns and the elimination of more powerful and “dangerous” guns means that we’ll be safer as a society. At first glance, this argument seems to hold water. After all, private gun ownership and violent gun-related crime in America are the highest among first-world Western nations. Therefore, gun control advocates call for the United States to mirror their European and Australian cousins: fewer guns, no “assault weapons”, and more regulation of the people who do legally own the guns that people will be allowed to own.

However, the most common arguments in favor of gun control do not hold up against closer inspection and reasoning. They do not satisfactorily demonstrate that fewer guns in the hands of private American citizens will make us safer. Here are some of the most common arguments in favor of gun control:

1) “Fewer guns would mean fewer gun deaths.”

This argument contains a true fact, but is inappropriately applied to the gun control conversation. In the West, countries with heavily-restricted private gun ownership do generally have lower deaths from firearms proportionally according to their populations. However, has the prohibition of private gun ownership in those Western nations truly made their populations safer?

2) “Fewer guns in society would make us safer.”

In the United Kingdom, which has been called the gold standard of gun regulation by gun control advocates, private firearm ownership was heavily restricted in 1997 after the Dunblane massacre (which is reminiscent of the Sandy Hook shooting). The rate of firearms-related deaths did seem to fall after the ban. Despite this seemingly-promising statistic, in the years following the 1997 legislation, the UK Home Office reported that crimes involving firearms increased every year. By 2005 and 2006, 6,000 more gun-related crimes were recorded than in 1998. The UK murder rate in 2002 was the highest in a century. Another study as reported by The Telegraph demonstrated that, in 2001, Great Britain “had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime.”

Home burglaries in the United Kingdom was another crime statistic that rose dramatically after the 1997 gun control legislation, which makes sense, since criminals no longer had to worry about homeowners being armed when they broke into their houses to steal from, rape, or harm the inhabitants.

In Mexico, private gun ownership is all but completely prohibited, and even carrying a knife on your person can land you in jail for years for possession of a deadly weapon. Despite this, in 2010, 24,374 people were killed by firearms. Some people may claim that these high numbers are due to the ongoing war between drug cartels and the Mexican government, but there are numerous reports of dozens of unarmed civilians at a time being killed execution-style. This is because the law-abiding Mexican citizens no longer have any means of defending themselves and their loved ones from those who wish to do them harm.

All these examples demonstrate that while strict gun control may lower the number of firearms-related deaths in developed countries, it does NOT guarantee people’s safety. And in the examples of Mexico and the United Kingdom, such gun control actually makes it easier for criminals to commit violent crimes against the unarmed citizenry.

3) “People being able to own assault weapons and high-capacity magazines causes more deaths and mass murders.”

This is an argument made by gun control advocates who most likely do not know anything about firearms, and who have probably never even held a real gun before, much less used one.

Anyone who has fired a fully-automatic gun knows how notoriously difficult such weapons are to control and shoot accurately. A person with little to no skill in shooting can empty an entire 30-round magazine at a crowd and maybe kill only a few people. On the other hand, a person who is skilled with firearms can have a revolver or a bolt-action rifle, and with no one else around him armed and ready to challenge him, can kill just as many (and most likely more) people than the novice with the full-auto “assault weapon”.

Firearms are just tools. Tools require skill to use effectively. Banning certain types of firearms that look scary to people with no clue about how guns work may sound appealing to those people, but there is absolutely no evidence that banning “assault weapons”, “military-style weapons”, and high-capacity magazines will prevent future massacres like the Sandy Hook and Aurora theater shootings.

None. Zip. Zero.

On the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre, a man in China ran into a school and slashed over twenty schoolchildren with a knife. I heard an argument from a gun control advocate that such an incident isn’t comparable to the Sandy Hook massacre because no one died in that incident, whereas 28 people died at Sandy Hook Elementary “because guns were used”.

Does this mean that gun control advocates would be less outraged over the Sandy Hook massacre if none of the students had died from their gunshot wounds? Would they be more outraged at the incident in China and calling for the banning of knives if the Chinese schoolchildren had died?

They most likely would not, but such logical fallacies and porous arguments highlight the emotional, non-fact-based nature of gun control advocates’ arguments.

4) “No one needs an assault weapon because no one in America will overthrow the government or stop a dictator.”

The spirit of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution was most likely written to ensure the right of the citizenry to protect their lives and liberty against a tyrannical government, as was the case of the colonists revolting against the British Crown and their Redcoat soldiers.

While it may be technically correct that we as Americans are not fighting to overthrow the totalitarian rule of an autocratic dictator thousands of miles away, this is a bad argument. If the federal government were to ban private ownership of so-called “military-style weapons”, do gun control advocates really believe that a) there will NEVER be a case in which Americans have to defend themselves and their families against a tyrannical government, and b) that, if so, Congress and the President will suddenly give Americans their Second Amendment rights back so that they CAN fight them?

Of course not. The Redcoats banned private ownership of guns by the colonists so that they could oppress them at will, without redress. Almost every single example of violent dictatorship in modern history has first outlawed private ownership of firearms, because it’s a lot easier to oppress a people if they’re unarmed.

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Most major studies on the correlation between gun ownership and gun violence do make it seem like more guns automatically equals more gun violence. But NO study has ever found a causal link between the two. Not only is it difficult to control for such a study, but there are gun statistics that gun control advocates like to ignore which tell the real story.

It is somewhat difficult to determine exactly how many people in the United States legally own firearms, and statistics vary by the source, but most data provided by the US government estimate that somewhere between 70 and 150 million people in the US own firearms that were legally purchased.

Let’s take the conservative end of that number (100 million). Compare it to the number of gun-related homicides in 2007 (12,632), and assume for the sake of argument that each homicide was committed by a different gun owner who only killed one person. That still comes out to 0.00013% of gun owners committing violent crime. The crime statistics will actually show that the number of people killed in each violent incident varies, and that some of the offenders killed multiple people multiple times. This means that the actual percentage of people who legally own firearms and who commit violent crimes with those guns would be even less.

Massacres such as the Sandy Hook incident are considered by the FBI to be spree killings, which is defined by the FBI as "killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders". However, the National Post writes in a July 2012 article that such spree killings account for less than 1% of all gun-related deaths in the US and only 12% of all shooting incidents in the US from 1900 to 2009.
This means that gun control advocates are using mere statistical anomalies to make an emotional, illogical argument to circumvent the 2nd Amendment and make it harder for the other 99.9% of law-abiding Americans to defend themselves however those citizens see fit.

For me, the Second Amendment is non-negotiable. All the other rights that so many people have fought and died for the great history of this country become moot if law-abiding citizens can no longer defend their lives, the lives of their loved ones, and their liberty.

Arguments in favor of gun control are emotional arguments that cherry-pick facts and statistics in order to support the government taking away all the scary-looking guns so that they and their children will be safe. But the actual data and the logical analysis thereof demonstrates that the only thing that further gun control (specifically the prohibition of certain types of firearms) will accomplish is the disarming of law-abiding citizens and the endangerment of the innocent.

Conservatives and libertarians must use the arguments I have laid out here to calmly and logically counter the emotional, tear-filled arguments of liberal gun control advocates. Our most important constitutional right hangs in the balance. And no matter how many crocodile tears President Barack Obama sheds and how many times legislators like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Ben Cardin pound their limp-wristed fists while calling for more control over your lives, those of us in (and on) the right must be there to stop them.

After all, evil thrives when good men and women stand idly by.