No one but the unnatural would condone last Monday’s attack in Orlando. I would like to believe that red and blue states have been united in their grief these past several days. Surely our political disagreements can’t prevent us from empathizing with the loss of a parent, a child or a lover.
And yet, I’m baffled by Washington’s inability to produce even the most basic gun control legislation. This was a terrorist attack, indeed, but it was also a reminder of the high cost of political gridlock. As a nation, we must come together in this fleeting moment of unity, stop antagonizing one another and permit the facts to guide us to a compromise that insures our security and safeguards our rights.
First and foremost, we must respect the fact that most gun owners are law-abiding. For the one-third of Americans who own a firearm, guns are symbols of independence and security. The gun lobby has persuaded many to distrust gun control, but I refuse to believe that anyone is immune to reason.
The numbers paint a grisly picture. The United States had a gun homicide rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2013, compared to 0.38 in Canada and 0.1 in Norway. It’s unsurprising when one considers that in the U.S. there were 88.8 firearms per 100 people in 2007, compared to just 31.3 in Norway and 30.8 in Canada. Put another way, 141,000 Americans died in gun homicides from 2000 to 2011 according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
That’s more than the number of American troops killed in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Skeptics retort that annual gun homicides have decreased 40 percent since 1993, but this is a misleading statistic. In fact, all violent crime has decreased, for reasons ranging from better policing to a booming economy in the ‘90s. Imagine if, hypothetically, fewer Americans annually developed skin cancer because they spent less time outside. We wouldn’t say skin cancer was curing itself, or that sunlight was no longer its cause. Likewise, our gun homicide levels remain an unsolved problem.
To make matters worse, American firearms are notoriously difficult to track and easy to acquire. Only 11 states maintain a firearm registry. Universal background checks were implemented in just eight states. Background checks keep guns out of criminals’ hands and registries prevent them from sidestepping the law by purchasing out-of-state weapons or exploiting the “straw purchase” loophole. Yet, these state registries were so poorly structured that only Maryland’s tracked gun ownership transfers after the initial purchase. In most U.S. states, firearms simply vanish.
Where it does exist, gun control in the U.S. is a state and local government responsibility, but inconsistent gun laws across counties and state borders make it difficult to effectively implement. Take Chicago, for instance, where handguns and gun stores were banned until 2010. Despite this, the city had one of the highest gun homicide rates in the country. The New York Times reported that of the 50,000 firearms recovered in the city from 2001 to 2012, weapons were traced to each of the 50 states and 60 percent of all American counties. 4,296 came from rural Mississippi alone. Because the laws aren’t standardized, relaxed gun laws anywhere undermine gun control everywhere.
In light of these facts, there is no justification for Congress’ inaction and torpor. We need a Great Compromise of gun control, and we need it quickly.
Every firearm should be registered in a national database, just like vehicles, and the punishments for possessing an unregistered weapon should be severe. Combined with strengthened straw purchase laws, this would curb weapons trafficking by targeting the traffickers themselves.
As always, compromise will require sacrifice. In exchange for these policies, gun control advocates must abandon the assault rifle ban. Convincing millions of gun owners to surrender legally-purchased weapons will be extremely difficult, and the notion of a ban fits perfectly into the pro-gun lobbies’ narrative of aggressive government overreach. We can still impede mass shootings by mandating that all assault rifles be registered, and by improving the mental health component of background checks.
The First Amendment, which contains the most fundamental American principles, is restricted. We can’t execute one another in the name of religious freedom, or slander and libel one another under the guise of free speech. The truth is that we as a people espouse shared values of liberty and security, and in their name we’ve achieved fair and balanced restrictions in the past. When groups like the NRA depict today’s gun control debate as an apocalyptic struggle between liberty and tyranny, it reveals a lack of faith in our democracy that I find defeatist and unpatriotic.
To quote the gun rights lobby, “it’s a people problem.” We, the people, have permitted Congress to sit idly by, while thousands are gunned down on city streets, in schools and nightclubs by killers we could have disarmed. No more.
Ian Burgess is a Trinity sophomore.
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