Editor, The Spotlight:
Mass shootings like the unspeakable tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut have become a seemingly regular occurrence in our country. Within the past year alone, lone gunmen have gone on homicidal rampages in a theatre in Colorado, a house of worship in Wisconsin, a mall in Oregon, a college in Oakland, and a coffee shop in Seattle. While these events have become infuriatingly common, what happened in Newtown was especially disturbing. There is no greater crime than violence against children. And a parent’s loss of a child under these circumstances must be one of the single worst experiences a human being can endure.
These catastrophes defy explanation, and doubtless the causes are multifaceted. A renewed discussion of the way our society treats those with mental illness is welcome. But deranged individuals exist in every country on earth – and yet mass shootings (and gun violence generally) occur far more often in the U.S. than any other industrialized democracy. The difference is here the mentally disturbed can access weapons of mass destruction with much greater ease than comparable countries like Canada, Japan, Australia, or most of the states of the E.U. There are approximately 310 million non-military guns in this country of 314 million people. There is thus about one civilian firearm for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. Ours is a society awash in guns.
What results from the ubiquity of guns in our country? Unsurprisingly, there is a strong positive correlation between the number of guns in a society and the gun homicide/violence rate. The U.S. has the twelfth-worst rate of firearm related deaths in the world. No comparable country is even close. Canada’s per capita firearm homicide rate is less than a third of ours. The U.K.’s per capita rate is 1% of that in the U.S. As maddening as these figures are, they confirm that, unlike natural disasters, gun violence is a societal problem that we have the power to stop or at least radically reduce. We just need the political will to implement sensible gun laws.
The gun used in Newtown was a Bushmaster AR-15, a military style assault weapon which is essentially a civilian version of an M-16. Such weapons are not tools for hunting or self-defense, they are high-powered instruments of destruction designed to kill and maim human beings. What is the social utility of allowing the general public access to such weapons? Does it in any way make our lives better? There is also no legitimate reason for lawful gun owners to possess high-capacity ammunition magazines like those reportedly used in the Newtown tragedy.
The gun lobby has responded to renewed calls for sensible gun laws with a variety of familiar but inherently flawed arguments. Given that the gun lobby is largely funded by firearms manufacturers, it is not surprising that their most common contention is that the solution to gun violence is more guns. Under this “Wild West” theory, the solution to mass shootings is an even more heavily armed general populace capable of defending themselves with equal firepower or deterring violence in the first place. As an initial matter, compelling educators to carry concealed weapons while teaching young children is an absurd notion. And the evidence demonstrates that the theory that more guns makes us more safe has zero validity. In the U.S., firearms are the most numerous and gun laws are the most lax in the South, which is also the part of our country with by far the highest violent death rate. In contrast, gun laws are the toughest in the Northeast, which has the lowest violent death rate in the country.
Unfortunately, banning assault rifles or high-capacity ammunition magazines and other more sensible gun control laws by themselves are unlikely to prevent all senseless horrors like unfolded in Newtown. Mass shootings do occur in other parts of the developed world, albeit with much, much less frequency than in the U.S. But the empirical data indicates that more rational firearms laws will, at the very least, reduce the everyday rates of gun violence in this country. At long last, the time to implement such common sense public policy that will keep us all safer is now.
Jeffrey Kuhn,
Bethlehem Town Board member