In 1998, my friend’s father woke up and walked to his son’s bedroom to make sure he was getting ready for school. His son was a 17 year old high school junior in a small, upper-middle class suburb of Orlando. Upon opening the door to his bedroom, the father saw the worst sight he could ever see.

He saw his son, lying in a pool of blood, with a massive chunk of his head missing, and a revolver not far from where his right hand had fallen.

It is impossible to understand what he could have been feeling, except maybe pure horror. No parent could ever have a nightmare more terrifying. But this was no nightmare, and it happens more than anyone would like to admit.

This July, in New York, a mother heard her son, Shawn, and his girlfriend, Kari, arguing in his bedroom. The two had just graduated from high school. Minutes later she walked into the bedroom to find Kari dead, with gunshot wound to her head. A gun lay beside her, and her son was nowhere to be found.

Shortly after being notified, local police found Shawn’s car next to a cemetery. Inside, they discovered the boy’s motionless body, with a gaping head wound, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound- this one from a different gun.

 “[It was] a high school-type relationship. In that age group, [the problems were] probably typical of that,” the chief investigator noted. “Obviously, from the perspective of a 19-year-old, seeing things the way he saw things, it’s, just like with everything, so much bigger than life. And the steps that he took had tragic results... It’s just a very sad thing.” Shawn was 19 years old, therefore completely permitted to own shotguns, yet still two years shy of the legal drinking age.

Another recent high school graduate, Gabrielle Martinez, was slain in a different murder-suicide this July. The 18 year old was shot and killed by her boyfriend, who later turned the gun on himself.

Gabrielle had been trying to end their relationship. To her boyfriend Raul, the combination of a firearm and an emotionally devastating event led to even more devastating effects. Her life, which included a future at the University of San Francisco, was tragically stolen from the world.

Some are too young to remember the tragic live TV suicides of news anchor Christine Chubbuck and politician Budd Dwyer who each gave the public a view of the true horror of a self-inflicted gunshot. Both fell dead, while still on the air, in truly heart-stopping sights; visions many people wish they had never seen. Once a person sees another human get shot, self-inflicted or otherwise, they never forget how truly ghastly and tragic it really is.

But today’s nightly news gives us a constant reminder that these events are not uncommon, especially in the United States. The Department of Justice estimates that in 2005, there were 16,692 people murdered in the US, by far the most of any other Western country. Firearms accounted for 72.6% of those murders, or just over twelve thousand deaths; twelve thousand people who may have been saved if it was only a little more difficult to obtain firearms.

There is often a great misconception that proponents of gun control want to take away from everyone the right to own guns. Gun control advocates are not in favor of eliminating the rights of appropriate people from keeping and bearing arms. We just want to ensure that mentally disturbed people and criminals have a much greater difficulty in attaining them. We want to make sure that those who own guns maintain the highest level of responsibility, so that the thousands of people who succumb every year from “unintentional” gunfire can be, at least, reduced.

Some people say that the Second Amendment ensures the citizens that the government will never become stronger than them. But the United States is a democracy, and people always have control over the government. If the populous feels mistreated by the government, then they vote its representatives out of office. They don’t show up at the State Capitol and start plugging Lawmakers.

Once a gun is fired, nobody can take the bullets back. A life may be lost due to the twitch of an index finger. The CDC also says that for people 15 to 24, only about one in 150 suicide attempts results in death. The chances of surviving a suicide attempt with a gun are nearly zero.

The civilians of the United States own more guns than every military force and every police force on Earth COMBINED, equating to an estimated 270 million guns. The word “overkill” comes to mind, and the word is very fitting for this topic. Both liberal and conservative Presidents eliminated tens of thousands of nuclear weapons since the late 70s. Their actions were a great benefit to mankind, at a loss of absolutely nothing. Having enough guns and ammunition to destroy every military force on Earth a thousand times over is no more useful than enough nuclear weapons to completely destroy the Earth.

The Supreme Court recently voted to strike down a law in Washington DC which once forbade citizens of the district to keep and bear arms. The Heartland Institute has cited a paper by Colin Loftin that “shows the decrease of both homicide and suicide following enactment of the District of Columbia's restrictive 1976 gun control law, which forbade the purchase, sale, transfer, or possession of handguns by civilians.”

Now, it will be interesting to find if the murder and suicide rates in DC, among the highest in the country, become higher or lower. Some experts suggest the rates will decrease, still others say they will increase.

Considering the massive number of firearms in the US, it is necessary to point out that gun accidents and unintentional shootings are problems that increase with the number of firearms.

On a somewhat comical note, in 2006 the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, accidentally shot attorney Harry Whittington, while they were out quail hunting. Cheney was reported to exclaim, “Harry, I had no idea you were there!” The bird shot entered Harry’s face, neck, and chest and actually caused him to have a heart attack. The Ambassador to Switzerland, who was along for the trip, must have been completely astonished. Harry was rushed to a hospital and recovered completely. Maybe next time the VP wants to hang out, the other two will suggest playing cards or going to the movies.

The story is humorous, but the situation could have resulted in a situation that was far worse. Although Dick Cheney accepted full responsibility, it would have been a far more difficult situation if Whittington had ended up dead. It paints an interesting picture of the US when the second highest executive officer in the Government unintentionally shoots one of his cronies while hunting with the ambassador to Switzerland.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution has been perhaps the single most debated sentence in the entire document. People all over the political spectrum have tried to dissect its language and intent. It reads:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

In 1789, when these words were drafted into the Constitution, the weapon of choice was a musket. Cannons and some forms of explosives were available to Militias, who the Amendment directly cites as a beneficiary of this right. But other than those, there was nothing foreseeable about the development of weapons that would come over the next 150 years.

Thomas Jefferson had never experienced any of the more modern forms of arms. He had never even heard of revolvers, Gatling guns, fully automatic sub-machine guns, plasma grenades, rocket launchers, missiles, remote or proximity mines, dynamite, and certainly not nuclear weapons. Very few of the NRA’s most ardent supporters would say that the Second Amendment grants every citizen the right to keep and bear hand grenades, surface to air missiles, and 10 megaton nuclear warheads.

It is completely obvious that the times have changed, and the average American citizen isn’t constantly at threat from Indian raids or wild animals attacking the kids. Civilization has made leaps and bounds through the industrial and technological revolutions. In today’s world, the responsible handling of weaponry is one of the symbols of a civilized society. For instance, in most of Europe the murder rate is only a small fraction of what it is in the United States. The only country that even comes close is Finland, whose murder rate is about 2/3 of ours, and Finnish citizens have the right to bear arms.

Among the 36 richest countries in the world, the United States has, by far, the highest number of gun-related deaths every year. The list of those countries also includes some nations not even considered to be part of the first world, like Mexico and Brazil.

Order and freedom always have an inverse relationship. More order leads to less freedom, and more freedom to less order. So the task of maintaining more order and security without greatly restricting freedom is the debate Americans are faced with today. When guns are allowed, the people have more freedom and less order. When guns are outlawed people have more order. If we want to eliminate crime, then we could always eliminate laws. Then everyone will have freedom, and there will not be any order. The goal of gun-control is not to eliminate freedom. It is to ensure that those who are responsible have the freedom to help maintain order.

Also, some people use the argument that criminals can get drugs even though they are illegal, so we can’t outlaw guns because the criminals would get them anyway. This is a ridiculous argument, unless people are trying to promote the legalization of narcotics. That is saying, “Hey, the law isn’t working, so we might as well legalize drugs…”

I doubt any right-wing NRA advocate would promote the legalization of heroin and crack cocaine.

The same pro-gun activists claim that we need the right to protect ourselves if someone were to break into our homes, or declare that if everyone had guns, the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres would not have happened. But the statistics are directly in opposition to these arguments.

Traci Lefever, a resident of central Florida brings up the point, “Realistically, what are the chances that you are going to have to pull a gun to defend yourself?” She asks, “How many times have you defended yourself with a gun? I would protect my children with my bare hands, and if someone shoots me, then it is my time to go. When you own a gun, the chance of the gun hurting or killing someone in your family is greater than the chance of needing it to defend yourself.”

Also, it has been widely shown that gun violence is highest in cities where gun ownership is highest.

It is frequently pointed out that the Virginia Tech Massacre took place on a gun free campus, but rarely cited that the psychotic madman who carried out these crimes was legally barred from owning or possessing a firearm. This demonstrates that the laws that are in place that deny the Second Amendment are not enforced at all. Few argue that the mentally ill and convicted felons should be allowed to have guns, and there are laws in place that aim to prevent these people from attaining guns, but the laws are not being enforced.

The fact of the matter is that no gun is safe. Here are a few facts about firearms in the US

·         According to one study, people living in households with guns are 2.77 times more likely to become victims of homicides than people living in households without a gun.

·         According to the CDC, gun violence is the second most likely cause of death for young people in the United States. They also claim that almost 3% of all firearm related deaths can be classified as “unintentional”.

·         The American Academy of Pediatrics asserts “States with the highest gun ownership rates also have the highest rates of completed teen suicides.”

·         In the US, every 20 minutes a gun is used to take someone’s life. Over 50% of the time, it is used by someone to commit suicide.

 

So the question is how many more people have to die for the US to put more checks and balances on who can obtain devices that have no other purpose than to kill. It should not be so easy for convicted criminals and mentally ill people to simply walk into a pawn shop, pay $80 in cash, and walk out with a hand cannon and bullets with the names of intended targets running through their heads. The government owes it to the people to maintain safety for all of its citizens. Within the next year, an estimated twenty five thousand American lives depend on it.

Twenty five thousand people do not have to die, but will, unless something is changed.