Gun Control: Misconception versus History, Science and Math
Last week, Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer murdered eight of his classmates. This tragic mass school shooting, coming right on the heels of the last one only three years ago, carries special weight because the murderer took his own life and deprived the American people of a sense of justice.
When the murderer in these cases cannot be made to face justice, the natural scapegoat is guns. Cries for "enhanced background checks", "common sense gun control" or "ban guns like Australia" fill the airwaves and social media sites, but these wouldn't have prevented the Sandy Hook tragedy or the recent tragedy in Oregon.
The failed history of gun control
The first failure of gun control to come to mind is the 1939 German Weapons Act which made it illegal for Jews to own or manufacture guns. The purpose of this gun control law was to eliminate any opposition to the Holocaust.
The gun control legislation implemented by the Nazis lead to the deaths of six million Jews. Countless millions more were killed defeating these gun control proponents.
Much closer to home is the failed experiment in Chicago wherein first handguns and then all other guns were banned in a series of Machiavellian political moves. As a result, Chicago became the deadliest city in America and was referred to as the Murder Capitol of the World by the Washington Post.
Before the Supreme Court overturned Chicago's ban on guns, 1 out of every 12 residents was the victim of a violent crime every year. After the gun ban was lifted, crime (including murders) immediately fell by 25%.
The science defends gun ownership
In Psycology, risk aversion is a preference for a sure outcome over a gamble with higher or equal expected value. It predicts that people will not take a risk if the prospective gains do not outweigh the risk.
In Economics, a positive externality is a benefit that is enjoyed by a third-party as a result of an economic transaction. This same principle applies to gun ownership.
Because a criminal cannot know in advance if a victim is armed, the perceived risk will be directly proportional to the known likelihood of of the victim being armed. In communities that are more heavily armed, like Plano, Texas, the perceived risk will be very high and violent crime rates there are very low. In communities where citizens are forbidden to have guns, like Chicago and Washington DC, the perceived risk will be very low and violent crime rates there are disproportionately high.
Australia disarmed its citizens after a mass school shooting in 1998. Just like in Chicago, violent crime exploded.
A ban on guns was just as unwelcome in Australia as it is here, but legislators naively passed laws that turned law-abiding gun owners into criminals. They masked the confiscation of rifles and shotguns by calling it a "buy back" and by giving the owners what they thought each gun was worth.
It should be noted that these were not consensual transactions between citizens and their governent--the government induced the transaction by labeling their guns illegal in an unmitigated act of tyranny. The gun ban has done nothing to reduce overall crime and Australians live in fear as a result.
Risk aversion is an integral part of every healthy mind. Penalties like prison sentences and the death penalty act as a deterrent by relying on the power of risk aversion.
These penalties have no effect on maniacs because they are insane and their unhealthy minds are not affected by empathy, risk or consequences. Mass school shootings are caused by insanity and not by guns.
The math supports gun ownership
The crime rates of Chicago during it's gun ban, when compared to that of the nation as a whole, speak for themselves. The likelihood of being murdered there was three times that of the national average.
Drastically falling murder rates after the lift of the gun ban further speaks to the fact that guns save lives. We may never know how many lives were lost in Chicago as a result of the gun ban.
The fact that 100% of mass shootings occur in gun-free zones drives the final nail in the coffin of any argument that claims guns cause deaths. Gun control advocates seem to miss that every time.
In conclusion
Unlike the victims of 9/11, who's demand for justice was answered with the death of Bin Laden, the victims of the Oregon shooting will never see Harper-Mercer punished. Their thirst for justice in the form of his death at the hands of the American justice system can never be slaked.
After every tragedy, the search for justice is only natural and some of the grief from 9/11 was relieved when Osama Bin Laden was killed, but the demand for justice didn't start off that way. Irrational cries for the criminalization of Islam rang out after 9/11 and the American people fought back that lynch mob mentality because we know it is wrong to sacrifice the liberty of all Muslims in order to punish a maniac.
For the same reason that we do not curtail the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of Muslims in order to fight Radical Islam, we must not curtail the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of every American man, woman and child to fight a single maniac who is already dead. Sacrificing our liberty as a scapegoat for a cowardly maniac does not bring justice to his victims--it unjustly punishes law abiding gun owners for the insane actions of Chris Harper-Mercier.
Ultimately, when soundbites calling for immediate legislation to ban or limit gun ownership are weighed against history, science and math, the conclusion is clear. Guns prevent far more murders than they are used to commit.
As Ben Carson says, "The heart of the matter is not guns." Punishing guns and gun owners for the actions of a maniac is counter-intuitive, counterproductive and un-American.
