Effort to reduce violence is not ‘gun grab’
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Rep. Ryan Zinke calls President Obama’s executive action to close loopholes in federal gun laws a “gun grab.”
I’d call it an effort to keep people from grabbing guns who have no business owning them. And a modest effort at that.
No one has lost his or her Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms (I’m pretty sure the Founding Fathers meant to add “responsibly” to that clause, but oh well). And no one is rounding up the rifles. Calm down, for Pete’s sake. The only ones benefiting from the fear-mongering are gun manufacturers, whose sales have more than doubled since 2009.
America – a country with the most guns per capita of any nation on Earth – also ranks at the top among our socio-economic peers for gun homicides (4.5 per 100,000 in 2013). According to the Mass Shooting Tracker, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people are killed or wounded, there were 372 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2015, which killed 475 and wounded 1,870. And that doesn’t count all the shootings by run-of-the-mill criminals and crazies: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 33,000 deaths and 80,000 hospitalizations per year from gunshots.
It also doesn’t include those mass shootings by lone gunmen that should be etched in our national psyches: Aurora. Columbine. Sandy Hook.
It’s true that guns don’t kill people, any more than cars kill people. But, knowing that cars driven recklessly can kill people, we have the good sense to license drivers, and write laws governing how we drive.
How is it, then, that we can’t even support the president’s feeble attempt to tighten loopholes in background checks, enforce laws on the books, boost gun-safety technology, and improve access to mental health?
Gun grab? What about the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that died with those children at Sandy Hook, or the prayer group in Charleston? Or the 17 Montanans slain in 2015 by members of their own families (a new record, by the way)?
I suggest we quit grabbing our guns, and put our minds together on how to build a less violent nation.
