It's been a little over a week since the tragedy in Orlando. It's been roughly six months since San Bernardino and another nine since the terror attacks in France. With terrorism on the rise, we must stop at nothing to dismantle the insanity that is guns. After all, it is a decent strategy to slow down terrorism that we must put into place for many reasons.
1. Evil is in the gun...not the heart?
Guns kill people. We know that. It has nothing at ALL to do with the person pulling the trigger. It's the gun's fault. I'm sure that the reason my guns haven't hurt anyone and won't is because they are just lazy. It's been unloaded and left alone for a few minutes (although most of the time it's in my gun safe or attended), but it's never come to life, loaded itself, and went on a killing spree like Chucky. Since Chucky is real, too, I'm sure my gun is just lazy.
2. It's a right, so what?
Our Founding Fathers wrote the 2nd Amendment with muskets, flintlock pistols, and hunting deer in their minds. Each of those weapons only has one shot before it can be reloaded which is scary in that of itself, but that is clearly what the Founders intended. They couldn't have possibly envisioned assault weapons that can discharge many, many rounds per minute. Could they? It's not like the Puckle Gun existed. It's irrelevant to this argument. It isn't like the Founding Fathers were waging war against a tyrannical government. They were just wanting to preserve the right to hunt deer. It's just like how they only wrote the 1st Amendment to cover verbal and written speech, not typed speech online. In that case, none of us have the right to speak online or via text.
3. No-Fly or Potential-Terrorist? No gun.
If someone is on a terrorist watch list or a "no-fly" list, he or she should not be allowed to buy a gun. Don't worry about Due Process, the Constitutional requirement that allows the government to take away the rights of a citizen IF AND ONLY IF he or she can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt in a court of law to be guilty of some crime that would merit the right in question to be revoked. Don't worry about the fact that those lists are totally arbitrary. No-fly and terrorist watch lists can be totally random, and you can end up on one for little to no reason at all, even because someone just "checked the wrong box." But I'm sure the government has and always will have our best interest at heart. Surely, it won't EVER abuse this power that it has unconstitutionally claimed for itself.
4. It's just restricting gun sales, not banning guns.
So those Pro-Second Amendment die-hards can relax. Restriction is about removing the deadliest military grade weapons from the market, even though military grade weaponry isn't available for the general populace already. AR-15's are fully automatic assault weapons, even though gun-makers and gun experts would beg to differ. They claim that "AR" doesn't stand for "Assault Rifle," but rather, it stands for ArmaLite Rifle. They also claim that it isn't a fully automatic weapon, and in testing one out, it's easy to see that they're right. But still, they look like military-grade weapons and should be restricted from civilian purchase because they're scary looking. It's not as if we're steadily giving the government the footholds to eradicate our rights. Right?
5. Make them illegal. That'll work.
Never mind the results of prohibition and the drug war. Just make guns or specific guns illegal. If you do that, there will be no guns, and no one will get shot - problem solved. Forget about the black market. Forget about the fact that there are over 300 million civilian-owned guns in this country (that's just the registered ones). And we know that terrorists and criminals will always follow the law, and they'd never resort to thievery so that they can kill and hurt people.
6. No one needs a gun anymore.
If you maintain the argument that it's a right, maybe you'll recognize that they are unnecessary. It's not like we have to hunt anymore. There's food at the market. It's not like we may need to defend ourselves from people who want to hurt us. We've got the police to protect us, even though they can't be everywhere at once. Forget about how much more efficient armed civilians are than even the police. Let the police do their jobs. Even though they are good at it, why help them or yourself? And government tyranny is just a thing of the past. Our government is the most transparent it's ever been, even more so than when someone could actually walk up to the White House and Thomas Jefferson would personally answer the door.
7. Other countries will see us as brutes and a threat.
We see this because the United States, once firmly established, has never been invaded by a foreign power, save for the British in the midst of the War of 1812 and in the Revolutionary War. Our greatest deterrent seems to be the extremely high number of civilian firearms. According to GunsinAmerica.com, America is number one in gun ownership per citizen with 88.8 guns per 100 people, and its murder rate is roughly an astounding five people per every 100,000. Look at its opposite, Honduras. Honduras has roughly nine guns per hundred citizens, and its murder rate is roughly 90.4 people per 100,000, annually. Although it may or may not be legitimate, a story has been floating around the internet that the Emperor of Japan during WWII once said, "You cannot invade mainland America because there would be a gun behind every blade of grass."
So obviously, looking at the facts and the Constitution, I am not an actual proponent of gun control. Evil is in the heart, not the tool. Knives, for example, kill at least 5 times more people per year than rifles. We, as American citizens, "have the right to bear arms that shall not be infringed," and under our Constitution, our rights can only be removed by Due Process of law, which means someone must be convicted and proven guilty of an actual crime. That's why the "no-fly" and "terrorist-watch" list proposals are unconstitutional. Those lists are so arbitrary that people could, and do, get put on a list for no reason at all; that lends the government power to imprison people that the majority disagrees with. Say you're a Republican and the leading party in the U.S is Democrat. The Democratic party would have the power to discriminate against the Republicans and say they are "mentally ill" or "potential terrorists," and as a result, Republicans would have their rights stripped of them with nothing other than a label being applied to them. We've seen this in world history before. Once the government starts restricting guns, eventually, the government is going to want to restrict more and more; once that happens, it's a slippery slope. And making arms illegal doesn't work. Look at the black market, prohibition, and the drug war as evidence. Killers and other criminals will still get guns. The only ones who won't are law-abiding citizens. Whether or not we need a gun anymore, although we do, is irrelevant; it is a right of the American People. And, truly, I prefer to be able to defend myself than become a sitting duck.
