Gun Control vs. Rights: Eliminating the Greatest Threats

By Broadside Opinion Columnist Arthur Gailes

The right to bear arms has been ours as long as our Constitution has existed. It’s the most controversial amendment in the Bill of Rights and it’s a right that we loathe to change at all. It’s an American tradition and after more than 300 years, why would we give it up?

We need to change our gun laws because they are wrong. For all the brilliance of our Constitution, we should never hesitate to change pieces of it that are outdated, and the current federal laws on gun control are as antiquated as limiting voters to white men who own property.

The tradition of bearing arms is founded in the paranoia of a people who were being oppressed by a foreign military and were desperate to see that this didn’t happen again. And like many actions based on fear, it lacks foresight. As a nation that prides itself on being forward thinkers, we can’t allow ourselves to continue to be tied down by these outdated traditions.

First of all, a major intention of the Second Amendment is to keep the government and its military from illegally violating our rights, and even overthrow that government if necessary. This is ineffective in times such as these. We are thankfully not allowed to possess the caliber of weapons necessary to compete with the military if they did wish to invade us on an individual level.

The idea of combating the government through violence is also a contradiction to the nature of the Constitution itself. The point of a democratic process in a government is to allow us to influence, change and overthrow the government through peaceful means. Furthermore, our thinking on protest has changed dramatically since the time of our revolution. If the exploits of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. have taught us anything, it’s that revolutionaries don’t have to engage in war.

After that, it’s the self-defense excuse. After all, why shouldn’t we be able to defend our homes and property? The problem is that legally owned guns are rarely used for this purpose. The amount of accidents, suicides and murders that involve legal guns drastically outnumber the self-defense cases. Psychological studies have shown that anxiety actually increases when people have guns, meaning that people are less likely to react well or reasonably in tense situations.

More to the point, self-defense would be less necessary if we sold fewer guns. It’s an underrated statistic that a top source of illegal guns is that over 1.7 million legal guns were stolen from 1992 to 2002. Also, if we stop selling guns legally, then law enforcement agencies can divert the resources they expend in monitoring, facilitating and ensuring the safety of the legal gun trade and spend those resources solely on controlling illegal gun trafficking.

While completely eliminating guns in America would be ideal, it is, for now, an illogical goal. The first step of controlling guns and gun violence, is just that: controlling rather than eliminating. Right now, guns are so poorly regulated that many people who buy guns are endangering themselves and those around them more than they are providing protection.

Most importantly, people who buy guns should have to submit to a strict training and test process that prevents the unskilled from purchasing guns. This will significantly reduce the accident rate, and people who can’t shoot aren’t going to be effectively defending themselves anyway. After that, these people should be required to take some sort of psychological test, where full compliance is required. If we’re going to give you a gun, you should at least be able to convince somebody that you’re not going to do something radical, like shoot it at somebody.

Finally, students should never, under any circumstances, be able to carry firearms at George Mason University. Many people will bring up the Virginia Tech shooting and cite Concealed Carry-On Campus Week as a movement that will allow us to defend ourselves. It also creates a hostile environment where the students are tense and the number of accidents that can happen increases. Also, since most students won’t have concealed weapons, the process for a concealed weapon license is already fairly hard to obtain, it will just make most students uneasy, as we will be surrounded by peers who have been given the power to take our lives at a whim.

Every college student in the country felt the impact of the Virginia Tech shooting. We all recognize that it could happen to us, too. The important thing now is that we do not allow ourselves to make the situation worse in our insecurity. While there are things we can do to improve our security – mainly, increasing the police presence at Mason – letting students walk around with guns is not the answer. Increasing the presence and amount of guns that we are surrounded with will only serve to increase the violence and risk in our lives.