The Time for Gun Control has come

Published in The Catalyst 

The Time for Gun Control has come

If you’ve been paying attention to national news lately, you’ve probably noticed that every day it seems another terrible incident is reported because somebody used a gun to kill innocent people. While the national homicide rate is undoubtedly rising, this sort of stuff isn’t new to the United States. In fact, the U.S. has a homicide rate, especially related to gun violence, that is wildly incomparable to any other nation in the developed world.

Just in the past couple days and weeks, the news has been inundated with horrific tragedy after horrific tragedy. On Monday, three people were shot and killed at an in-home day care in a suburb northwest of Minneapolis. On Sunday morning, four New York City police officers were shot outside of a Brooklyn apartment building. One of them was shot in the face. On Saturday, five people were shot in the north side of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Three of them died. Last Tuesday, seven people were gunned to death at a Christian University in Oakland. Three more were badly injured by the bullets. And of course, just over three weeks ago, Treyvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, in what has become the most covered news story of 2012.

As people continue to protest nationwide for justice in the Tryevon Martin case, we can look back at these tragedies and unfortunately, keep expecting them to come.

Isolating each case and blaming each gunman for the killings won’t solve the epidemic of gun violence that is destroying this country. We must understand that angry and crazy people will always exist, as they do in every country. The problem here in America is that we allow these people to get guns more easily than they can in any other developed nation.

Surely, there is no need to oversimplify the problem. Gun control may be the bulk of the issue but ignoring violence in media, poverty and gangs won’t get us anywhere. Still, these problems exist in other countries that have a tiny fraction of the gun-related death rate we have here in the United States.

The time for gun control is now.

As Patrica Weller wrote in The New York Times on Sunday, these violent rampages force us, once again "to consider whether to have a productive dialogue about gun control in this country to squander the opportunity, as has happened before."

This productive dialogue, if it is ever had, must put in place gun control laws, particularly in the inner-cities, that dramatically reduce American’s ability to acquire gun licenses and firearms. 

President Obama, whose party, no different than the Republicans, has done little to nothing to reduce so-called “gun ownership rights” since 2008. Still, an irrational fear that the democrats are chipping away at the right to bear arms has motivated a steep rise in the purchasing of guns- a sign that our gun violence problem is set to worsen.

We need to stop people from buying guns and limit certain people from the right to own guns. Bill Cosby, who made news last week when he made the argument that neighborhood watch volunteers should not be armed, is right. Sure, police officers should carry a gun to protect and serve their community. Police officers who misuse their authority should be brought to justice, as is often not the case. But everyone else should be barred from owning a gun. We need to do away with the second amendment as it stands.

Everyday Americans, crazy or not, should not be given the innate right to own a deadly weapon. The fact of the matter is that those who own guns are not safer than those who do not. Statistics prove time and time again that those who own guns are actually in greater danger than those who do not. They are far more likely to accidentally kill themselves or someone else than they are to injure a intruder.

Moreover, those who own guns are far more likely to successfully act on suicidal intentions than those who don’t have an “easy way out”. The argument against gun ownership can be made from dozens of angles. The fact is, our weak gun ownership laws are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans every year. It’s about time we got serious about gun control.

Yahoo News, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal served as sources for this article.