Opinion: Increased Gun Control Is Not The Solution

The mainstream media places massive amounts of emphasis on stories of mass shootings because they are undeniably horrific, terrifying events and guns are undeniably dangerous machines that are capable killing massive amounts of people. However, guns are portrayed as extremely dangerous killing machines that should be outlawed, when in reality your cute yellow Volkswagen Bug is deadlier.

An article written by BBC.com titled Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence states that in 2015 around 13,286 people died from being shot by a firearm. Another article written by Asirt.org titled Road Crash Statistics states that nearly 1.3 millions people die in road crashes per year. On average that is about 3,000 people dying everyday due to car accidents…every 4.5 days the amount of deaths due to car accidents matches the yearly avg. amount of deaths due to guns.

Motorized vehicles are more dangerous than guns and not just because accidents happen on the road that result in death. Motorized vehicles are not designed as killing machines however in the wrong hands they can be used as weapons. An example of this would be the acts of terror that recently occurred on June 19th outside of a mosque in London when a deranged person driving a van hit pedestrians killing one person. And again on August 17 another person driving a van struck pedestrians on the streets of Barcelona killing 12 people.

Not only are motorized vehicles more deadly than guns, but going to the hospital could be as dangerous if not more. In an article written by CNN reporter Jen Christensen titled, Medical Errors May Be Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S. published May 3rd 2016, Christensen presents a fact that states, “The study, from doctors at Johns Hopkins, suggests medical errors may kill more people than lower respiratory diseases like emphysema and bronchitis do.”

On Sept. 19 2013, Marshall Allen published an article on Propublica.org titled How Many Die From Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals? and stated that 98,000 people die on average in the U.S from malpractice. As quoted above from BBC.com roughly 13,000 people die from gun violence a year proving that doctors are more dangerous to American citizens than firearms however we require them to get some of the most rigorous qualifications and education in order to make a visit to the doctors as safe as it can be.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC.gov) published an article in 2016 titled, Leading Causes of Death which states that cancer is the leading cause of death today in the United States followed by chronic respiratory diseases, accidents, strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, Influenza, nephrotic syndrome, and suicide.

It is undeniable that some sort of change has to occur in order to address the issue of mass shootings, however taking away people’s guns is not the solution. Politicians and lobbyists alike try to provoke change by conducting polls and surveys to “prove” that the majority of people believe x, y, and z. Once a poll or survey has been completed and it finds that “x” amount of people are in favor of  increasing gun restrictions, they use these qualitative statistics to try an enforce change. If laws surrounding gun control were decided by actual gun owners and people trained in the area then maybe we would see practical solutions to this problem. Currently we have a misinformed public being scared of guns to the point that they agree to make them illegal.

“Be wary of post-Las Vegas shooting polls calling for stricter gun control,” said Grant Stinchfield on October 12th 2017 while hosting NRATV at MediaMatters.org. “The problem with these polls are that the majority of people surveyed are uninformed and don’t own firearms. Now that is an important distinction. Those who don’t understand the issues aren’t the ones that should be making the judgments surveyed.”

Outlawing gun ownership or limiting the types of guns that the civilian population can own is the first action that gets suggested by politicians and lobbyists looking to reform. These acts of violence are not caused by the weapons themselves; they are caused by the insanity and the violence that is manifesting through the person behind the trigger. Blaming guns is easy because we think we can control guns but not people.

“Las Vegas, we are grieving with you—the victims, those who lost loved ones, the responders, & all affected by this cold-blooded massacre,” said Hillary Clinton via Twitter. “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get. Our grief isn’t enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.”

Clinton jumped on Twitter hours after the attacks in Las Vegas in order to say that this is not a time to get political, but then she immediately ignores her own words and gets political by saying that the NRA wants to make it easier for civilians to get silencers, and that we need to stand up to the NRA.

Whenever a mass shooting happens the first reaction by most is one of terror and confusion which makes us human beings feel scared and out of control, thus the initial reaction is to take some action in order to prevent such an event from happening again. However the issue with gun violence is not that guns are malicious but that the people behind the guns are malicious and there needs to be more research done in order to find out what causes a person to do such a thing.