“They shot my baby, my baby,” said the mother of 7-year-old Desirae Macias. That child is now brain-dead. Probably more than 80 years of life, joy, sadness, regret, love, hope, all erased by a gun in an angry man’s hand.
At 92 years strong, Cornelius Swinton was shot as he drove his taxi. He is in critical condition. More than 80 years of productive, compassionate life rewarded with stray bullets. Keep the change.
Megan Bookstaver, 23, a college student — one of us — dead because of an unregistered gun. No criminal charges are being filed.
Thirteen people were gunned down by “a military-grade weapon” last Thursday in the middle of Chicago.
As of June, about 24,000 people had died by gun since the events in Newtown, Conn.
Remind me again why untraceable guns are sold online and at gun shows without so much as a background check? Remind me why many states say former felons can’t vote, but the right to a gun is unquestioned? Remind me why 13 people are dead in a Navy Yard because a psychiatric patient who heard voices and had several gun-related offenses on his record was allowed to legally purchase guns? Remind me what happened in Newtown?
The second amendment gives us all the right to bear arms. It was written as a “physical protection of liberty clause” in case our government did not live up to the bargain of democracy. But allowing criminals and mass murderers to purchase guns doesn’t seem like a good way to defend liberty. So why do we make this allowance and use this clause as a bedrock of support for our idiocy?
The common refrain from the National Rifle Association is that we can’t regulate our way out of this bloodbath. It even goes so far as to say that further regulations would be more dangerous.
Maybe the NRA should tell that to the wonderful people in Iowa who are now in mortal peril because blind people can legally own and publicly carry guns. It’s not like you need any sort of skill or precise aim to shoot modern guns nowadays, am I right?
How about we take a look at the other feature of American life that causes more than 30,000 unnecessary tragedies a year: driving fatalities.
Both guns and cars are powerful and important parts of American liberty. The difference is we heavily regulate the use and production of cars, and we leave the gun locker open. When the government began to discuss regulations for the automotive industry in the ’70s, automakers lobbied heavily against any new laws. There was the same refrain we hear now in the gun debate: The tool isn’t what kills people, the user is.
Over the following decades, however, Uncle Sam still passed increasingly strict safety regulations on cars, drivers and highway conditions. The result? Automotive fatalities have fallen massively. Specifically, 54,589 people died from automotive accidents in 1972. In 2011, it was just over 32,000. That decline occurred even though the number of drivers skyrocketed from 62 million to 210 million.
The general consensus is that government regulations — through their targeted attacks on drunk, distracted and inexperienced teenage drivers, as well as seatbelt use and the tireless effort of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to push automakers to make safer products — have caused this decline.
The government targeted the two areas, against a well-financed industry lobby, that were causing the majority of deaths: irresponsible or inexperienced users and dangerous equipment.
We should target the same areas with guns.
It’s true guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people — specifically, inexperienced or unstable people. Giving them high-magazine combat-grade guns doesn’t help. It is easier to teach someone how to use a gun than it is to save him when he’s shot himself. Isn’t it weird, then, that there are 43 states in which you can legally buy a gun without any sort of permit or licensing?
In dozens of these states, you don’t even have to register your gun. You could be blind, psychotic, incompetent, suicidal or a criminal. Imagine if the government just handed drivers licenses to everyone. Now imagine that cars were designed to kill.
The training and licensing process should be as, if not more, extensive than new driver licensing. Twenty hours minimum of training, a written exam, a mental health test and an extensive “road test” to demonstrate an owner can safely use his or her gun.
No one should be able to buy a gun through any public market unless every member of his household is licensed or he buys a certified gun locker that he will, under penalty of law, use to keep guns out of the reach of non-certified residents. There should be graduated classes of gun licenses based on caliber and number of rounds and guns owned. Large magazine guns and other mass-death weapons should be regulated out of the market.
The question of ensuring there is safer equipment is more tricky. Even as gun deaths rise, we are regressing in our policies. With a strong push from the NRA, Congress passed The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005. According to Time Magazine, the PLCAA essentially “shields the gun industry even when it makes guns that are unnecessarily dangerous and sells them recklessly.”
Because of this law, no plaintiff can win a malpractice case against gunmakers. Instead of incentivizing the production of safe guns, we have opened the doors for gunmakers to sell higher margin mass-destruction guns. More power, higher price, more bullets sold.
Even if someone came forward against Smith & Wesson because its products were to blame in an accidental or mass shooting, no one could sue the manufacturer.
It seems weird that people can sue McDonalds or a family restaurant because their coffee is too hot or their sidewalk is wet and someone falls, but we can’t sue gunmakers for facilitating mass shootings or making interfaces that allow children to shoot themselves.
You may say that facilitation is not the same thing as pulling the trigger, and I agree. But it really doesn’t seem right that because the gun lobby spent a little extra money on lobbyists, they receive the get-out-of-jail-free card that a small business cannot. And think of how much safer we would be if gunmakers were actually legally concerned with what their weapons were used for — maybe they wouldn’t try to sell guns to kids or crazy people.
Maybe 30,000 people don’t have to die every year. Tell your congressman.
Nico Enriquez ’16 is a diehard moderate. He can be reached at nenriquez3@gmail.com.
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