Any discussion of gun use in America quickly turns into an ideological debate about gun rights versus gun violence. Those who fear the damage gun violence can do want more gun control laws, while those who fear losing their guns cite everything from video games to mental illness as the cause for violence in this country.
We are moving away from a frank analysis of gun use and moving towards a discussion of absolutely anything besides guns themselves.
The way we speak about guns has even changed in the past three decades. Since 2008, the term “Second Amendment” has been used more frequently in the news media than the phrase “gun control.” (NewsLibrary.com)
Gun rights activists have a much easier time securing sympathy for their position when they can frame the debate in terms of Constitutional rights, rather than the effects of gun violence.
One of the most common points of deflection in the conversation about gun violence is that we need to keep guns out of reach from people with mental illness. In fact, people with mental illness commit only 4% of violence within the U.S. (American Journal of Psychiatry)
Mental illness is not the true culprit here, much less the people who live with it daily. According to the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, which used 18,000 subjects, even people with severe mental illnesses were not particularly prone to violence.
People with mental illness are about twice as likely to commit violence in their lifetimes than the general population. In contrast, the study found that those with substance abuse problems were seven times as likely to commit violence compared to the general public.
Even so, professional psychiatrists admit that it is virtually impossible to predict which people will be violent, based on their mental health profile alone. Jeffrey Swanson is an expert in violence epidemiology and a psychiatry professor at Duke University. He explains, “Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individuals patients will do something violent and which will not.” (NYTimes)
It can be very tempting to pinpoint our nation’s issues with violence and use people with mental illness as a scapegoat. An already stigmatized group makes an excellent villain in the scheme of gun violence. And it is very easy to target villains in clear cut tragedies like mass shootings.
But the reality is that mass shootings do not make up the majority of gun deaths. These shootings are isolated, if bloody incidents that seem to occur randomly. These shootings receive extensive media coverage, when compared to average gun homicides and suicides.
This imbalance in coverage can lead us to forget the daily horror of gun violence in our own cities. In 2012, Chicago saw 500 homicides, 87% of which involved guns. Three hundred nineteen students were shot in Chicago public schools throughout the past school year, with 24 resulting deaths. (Chicago Sun-Times)
Easily-accessible information from the United States Census Bureau shows that young black men in America die from gun violence at eight times the rate of young white men.
Black Chicagoans make up 33% of the city’s population, but 70% of its murder victims. Philadelphia shares a similar problem: in 2011, of the 324 murder victims in the city 80% were killed by guns. And of those victims, 75% were black Philadelphians.
Mass shootings are certainly tragic events. But so is each and every time a young person falls to liberal gun use in our cities. Perhaps these victims are not considered newsworthy because their deaths seem a common fact of city life.
But if it is so commonplace that their names are not mentioned in the news, then it is a big enough national problem to deserve immediate attention. If we devoted more time to righting the wrongs of gun violence and less time to defending our “right” to potentially commit violence, we could be closer to solving the problem.
In an official statement from the National Rifle Association (NRA), Wayne LaPierre, NRA’s executive vice president stated, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
There are no “good guys with guns” and “bad guys with guns,” because there are no “good guys” or “bad guys.” There are only people with guns. Life is not an old Western or a superhero movie. People are more ethically complex and at the same time more animalistically compulsive than we give ourselves credit for.
Of course weapons should be kept out of the hands of people who would use them unwisely. But this premise forces us to consider what a wise use of a weapon is.
Are we using weapons wisely if we kill only “bad” people? We are all human, which means that on any given day we could fall into either of these categories. We can easily be a good guy one moment and a bad guy the next. If we are armed at all times, it is much more likely that our changing moods can turn from aggravating to lethal in an instant.
In order to move towards any solution to the problem of gun violence in the U.S., we must push beyond the parallel of hero/villain. Real life battles do not have winners or losers, whether they are fought on foreign soil or in our own streets.
When guns are involved, everyone is at risk. Owning a gun does not make someone more violent, but it makes it far more likely that if they ever chose to hurt someone else, or themselves, their force would be lethal.
The more armed everyone is, the less safe we all are, whether those weapons belong to evil people or morally upright people. It is our social obligation to limit the amount of deadly weapons in our homes and in our cities. We owe it to one another to end the violence.
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