The start of another school year in America brings with it the inevitable, tragic school shootings that destroy the lives of children. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children aged 1 to 18. Over 1,400 kids aged 17 and under were killed by guns last year, and almost 4,000 more were injured. 80% of all US homicides involve firearms, and there are more mass shootings than days in the year.
Bought and paid for politicians exhaust every effort looking for something to blame, from video games to mental illness, pharmaceuticals, gangs, and even the LGBT community. All of it meant to distract from the correct answer: it is the guns.
These distractions are effective enough that progress is never made, and thousands of lives are senselessly lost every year. It’s time to expose these false arguments so we can move forward from debating whether we should make a change to focusing on what changes we should make.
Claim: More gun laws won’t help.
The most common defense for the status quo of gun violence is that gun laws won’t solve the problem. Take Chicago, the third-largest city in America. You will hear politicians make the point every week that Illinois has more restrictive gun laws than the average state, yet Chicago still experiences many shootings.
What you won’t hear them admit is that 60% of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from out of state, with big offenders being Indiana and Mississippi, both states with weak gun laws. Once the laws in your state cause people to be killed in other states, the problem needs to be dealt with at the federal level.
The effectiveness of gun laws can most easily be seen by charting states based on the strictness of their gun laws and the level of gun deaths, as shown in this chart from Gifford’s Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Some will attempt to dismiss this chart because gun deaths include suicides, and apparently, those are a tragedy we should ignore. So here is a chart that separates the forms of gun deaths, along with a map of US states by the strength of their gun laws, to make it clear that stronger gun laws reduce both homicides and suicides.
Claim: If there were no guns, people would murder as often, but with knives or other weapons.
If this were true, then we would see similar homicide rates among our peer nations, only with different causes of death. But we don’t. America’s homicide rate is much higher.
US homicide rate: 5.9 per 100,000
Japan: 0.23
Italy: 0.54
Switzerland: 0.597
Ireland: 0.65
Spain: 0.69
Norway: 0.72
Germany: 0.82
Australia: 0.85
United Kingdom: 1.1
France: 1.3
Canada: 2.2
80% of US homicides involve a firearm, and America’s firearm homicide rate is 15x the rate of knife homicides in the UK.
What about if we take gang-related gun homicides out of America’s total? It only decreases the number of homicides by about 13%, barely reducing the homicide rate and leaving the US far above our peer nations.
Claim: The problem is mental health.
Blaming mental health for America’s high gun violence does a disservice to both addressing gun violence and ensuring people with mental health issues can get the care they need without facing social stigmas.
Australia, Spain, France, and Ireland all have a similar rate of mental disorders as America, but, as shown above, drastically lower gun violence and homicide rates. Mental health issues aren’t driving America’s gun violence, but proper gun laws would help keep firearms out of the hands of people who may be a threat to themselves or others due to mental illness.
Claim: America has always had lots of guns. It must be something else.
There are several issues with this statement.
In 1950, there were 54 million guns in the US with a population of 150 million. Today, there are around 450 million guns with a population of 340 million. The number of firearms in America has exploded.
This was facilitated in part by the Supreme Court's 2008 decision, which ruled that the Constitution grants individuals the right to own a firearm. Before then, the Supreme Court had upheld multiple times that the amendment, which 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.” applied to militias, not individuals.
In addition to the explicit callout of militias in the text, the use of the phrase “bear arms” at the time referred to military activities. Something made clear through a decision from the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1840, which stated:
“A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”
The original version of the Second Amendment, passed by the House of Representatives, made it even clearer that this applied to military groups, not ordinary citizens:
“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
None of this mattered to the 2008 Supreme Court when it wiped out 230 years of constitutional history in an instant. The number of guns in the US has increased by over 150 million since the 2008 ruling, an increase of over 50%.
The same ruling changed what types of guns Americans carry by overruling a DC handgun ban, and later in 2010, the court extended that ruling to the states. Today, over half of all gun homicides are caused by handguns.
Americans’ views of guns have changed in modern times, too. Up through the 1960s, people primarily owned hunting rifles and shotguns. Firearms were viewed as tools used for recreational purposes. In the 1970s, the NRA adopted a new position, promoting the idea that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to possess firearms for self-defense. The organization focused on political lobbying and activism to promote this new idea to the nation.
As far as AR-15 style rifles, those first became available for civilian purchase in the 1960s. However, it was rare for anyone to own one, and Colt, which held the patent, manufactured them in small quantities, typically under 3,500 per year.
The patent ran out in 1989, allowing additional companies to bring these military style rifles to market, expanding their use, and after the 2004 federal assault weapons ban expired, boutique gun manufacturers began making high-end versions, accelerating sales and ushering in the deadliest mass shootings America has ever experienced.
No, America has not always had guns or access to them on the level that we do now. The laws, including the Supreme Court’s views of the Second Amendment, have shifted dramatically, leading to the devastating level of gun violence we see today.
While it is challenging to get historical data on nationwide gun homicide rates beyond a few decades ago, a study done in Philadelphia in 1950 found that guns were responsible for 33% of homicides in the city. Today it has risen to 90%.
Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger, on the topic of the Second Amendment being interpreted as an individual’s right to own a gun, said:
“has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
That fraud has become the number one killer of children aged one to eighteen, and leaves America facing far more homicides than the rest of the developed world.
We need to do a lot more than offer thoughts and prayers after the daily mass shootings; we must have a serious conversation about the disaster that easy access to guns has been for the nation. But the only way that can happen is if we stop letting people get away with lies designed to excuse these senseless tragedies.
We can have a Second Amendment. We can have proper gun reform. We can save lives.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5470828-fbi-data-violent-crime-cities/
https://giffords.org/lawcenter/resources/scorecard/
https://www.healthdata.org/research-analysis/health-topics/mental-health
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-nra-rewrote-second-amendment
Rights Come With Responsibilities
Rights come with responsibilities. We have the right to free speech, but we have a responsibility not to abuse that right by causing harm to others. That is why we have defamation, libel, and slander laws. They protect Americans from being maliciously lied about.
Here you are preaching to the choir. People who I follow on TikTok, who reference the Constitution and are usually correct, mess up the second. And of course our Founders didn't know about the weaponry we'd develop. Thats why the Constitution can change. According to a study of 900 references to 2A when it was developed, only one unambiguously referenced individual rights and only nine others mentioned individuals at all. The Founders could have made it clear and just said the right to own a firearm is up to the individual. But they didn't. We'll never change it because the NRA funds both sides. Our entire Congress is bought and paid for.