Let’s take a break from the coronavirus for a few moments. Let’s go back to everyone’s favorite topic after a mass shooting.
Do you know what’s great about COVID-19? With everybody locked up, there have been two months of no school or workplace or hospital or movie theater shootings. Nothing has been open.
Oy vey!
Guns and violence. Personally, I believe they go hand in hand. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s and we were told, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Nothing comes after it. No conclusion. No argument.
Gun violence is a contemporary global human rights issue. Gun-related violence threatens our most fundamental human right, the right to life.
Gun violence is a daily tragedy, currently on hiatus, affecting the lives of individuals around the world. More than 500 people die every day because of violence committed with firearms.
Anyone can be affected by firearm violence but in certain situations, gun violence disproportionately impacts communities of color, women, and other marginalized groups in society.
Sometimes, the mere presence of firearms can make people feel threatened and fearful for their lives with severe and long-term psychological effects on individuals and whole communities.
I have never fired a gun and do not intend to. My friends, which these days hover around two, love firing weapons. They keep their weapons in a lockbox for protection. (“Hey guy breaking into my home, give me a second. What is that number? Did I change the combination?”). To be fair, each goes to a range and fires every now and then but that seems to be less and less, especially since the virus came along.
Every time there is a shooting, we await news outlets like CNN to arrive, talk to survivors, heroes, politicians, and family of the victims. We are sickened. We cry. The president becomes consoler in chief and praises the first responders and speaks about unifying the country.
Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Charleston Church, Orlando Night Club, Fort Lauderdale Airport, Las Vegas Concert, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to name a few.
Children, worshipers, travelers, students. We watch the video of the gun violence in the coming days and listen to the rhetoric of the politicians.
The NRA is too powerful. It’s not video games. It’s not background checks. It’s not assault rifles. It’s not the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment was meant to help the people protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Just like the revolutionaries who fought against the King of England, they wanted to maintain their right to “bear arms” in case the new government began to take away their rights.
I live twenty minutes from MSD High School. My sister’s kids are graduates. Seventeen people are dead and yet I watched the president fly to Mar-a-Lago, drive later that day to the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, and joke with Sheriff Scott Israel, telling him that his people should get a raise.
I watched as the students and parents arranged a town hall meeting at the BB&T Center. Senators Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio expressed their views on gun control. The students begged them to denounce the NRA. Both showed remorse and explained how they set their agendas, not the other way around, refusing to incriminate the NRA.
Children and educators. Dead. For no reason.
I was performing some fact-checking and this looked pretty interesting. Remember, this was pre-pandemic. There is a definition of gun violence. So, check this out:
Gun violence is violence committed with the use of firearms, for example pistols, shotguns, assault rifles or machine guns.
Want some statitsctis?
How many people die from gun-related violence worldwide?
- More than 500 people die every day from gun violence.
- 44% of all homicides globally involve gun violence.
- There were 1.4 million firearm-related deaths globally between 2012 and 2018.
The majority of victims and perpetrators are young men, but women are particularly at risk of firearms violence perpetrated by an intimate partner. Sexual violence can also be facilitated by firearms.
How many people are injured by gunshots worldwide?
- An estimated 2,000 people are injured by gunshots every single day.
- At least 2 million people are living with firearm injuries around the globe.
Millions of people suffer the severe and long-term psychological effects that gun violence – or the threat of gun violence – brings to individuals, families and their wider community.
In the USA, nearly 134,000 people were shot and injured by firearms in 2019.
It costs money to be a member of congress. The NRA supports a vast majority of our leaders and they simply refuse to give up that revenue stream, so they make their deals with the devil and we watch, and we mourn. We mourn the losses of innocent children, movie goers, high school students, senior citizens, worshipers until we regain our lives and wait for the next shooting.
So, back to the slogan, “Guns don’t kill, people kill.” The argument starts with a person deciding to murder. But nothing follows from these facts about whether guns should be regulated. Such facts are true for all criminal activity and even noncriminal activity that harms others: The ultimate cause is found in some decision that a person made; the event, activity, or object that most directly did the harming was only a proximate cause.
In addition to guns, people have died from gasoline, cars, alcohol, knives, toilets, rugs, and horses. “Toilets don’t kill, people who use toilets kill.”
People with a criminal history can purchase guns if they want. No background check will stop a purchase on a street corner. So, do we take away our right bear arms? No. Should we take Assault rifles off the street? Yes. Will that stop mass killings? No.
Still with me? If you are then you’re asking how long does a background check take?
After you fill out the form, the person selling you a gun will run your information through NICS, which is maintained by the FBI. Running a background check through NICS takes about 30 seconds. If there is nothing on your record that prohibits you from buying a gun, you can go ahead with your purchase.
30 SECONDS!
There is no way to know whether the recent White House proposals will be effective in reducing gun violence. How can there be, when it’s so difficult to assess the actual policies that have already been tried, let alone vague plans? But the White House proposals do at least plausibly target several components of the gun violence problem.
Probably the most significant proposal is the idea of requiring background checks for gun sales between private individuals, not just from licensed dealers (with some exceptions, such as transfers within a family). Private sales are currently the main way guns move between legal and illegal owners. However, the White House has yet to specify how a private seller would perform such a check.
From where I sit, I know it’s complicated. But sitting around and arguing seems worse than congress tightening gun laws and waiting for the next shooter to pull a trigger, kill innocent people and praise the police for arriving in six minutes preventing countless more senseless, cowardly shootings.
I’m not a Trump supporter but let’s look at the big picture. He has been the only president and there were forty-four before him who has been able to slow the gun violence.
Just wait until the day during his campaign when he learns that COVID-19 was responsible for months of no mass shooting. “I was the only president able to stop the violence. Sometimes your president needs to think outside the box. “