The American public has a decision to make: do we want to ensure plentiful safety and prosperity or do we want to uphold the Second Amendment?
“Why can’t we do both?”
The simple truth is that this nation’s sprawling heap of firearms, and the ideologies used to distribute them, are in direct contradiction with the supposed first priority of safety. We cannot have this many guns and be safe. Harvard Law School’s Kate Mauser cites the common charts: a linear, positive trend on gun deaths per 100,000 people vs the percentage of gun ownership by household, and the same vs guns per 100 people (both curves show the same trends).
The Harvard School of Public Health also compiled a meta-analysis of gun violence archives and studies to come to four massive and debate-ending conclusions:
- In general, where there are more guns, there is more homicide.
- In nations with more guns, there is more homicide.
- In U.S. state with more guns, there is more homicide.
- In regions where more guns are present, there are more police officers shot and killed.
Surprisingly, I’m not going to reference a mass shooting this week. Even though they serve as staunch evidence in favor of assault weapons bans and high capacity magazine bans, they still only represent a tiny fraction of one percent of the total homicides in this country, even though they by far receive the most publicity.
My blog today will bring light to the tragedies that “only” get local news coverage. Small, constant incidents of gun accidents, suicides, and homicides that affect “only” a handful of people are what drastically differentiate the United State from the rest of the world.
As of writing this blog at the tail end of November, the Gun Violence Archive records over fourteen thousand deaths by firearms in the United States. 677 of those were children aged 0-11 with accidents being the main source of their demise. Almost 29,000 people have been injured by guns this year alone.
One of the biggest arguments in favor of civilians owning weapons is personal defense. Gun owners consider themselves lawless cowboys or independent, strong people that can defend themselves against a threat at a moment’s notice; the evidence, however, shows that less than two thousand of the gun incidents were innocent citizens defending themselves. Furthermore, the paranoia of gun owners regarding situations like these is not based in any fact at all. An ABC News piece on the reaction times of concealed carry holders in mass shootings shows that unsuspecting defenders of “life and liberty” in these situations frequently get shot and killed before firing a single shot in retaliation in the direction of the perpetrator.
With minuscule numbers of incidents ending favorably for the innocent defenders overshadowed by the tens of thousands of injuries and deaths every single year, the debate is over for the question of more guns equaling more peace and security. It is empirically, demonstrably, scientifically false.