A topic that has been hot in a lot of places and I have been meaning to write about; Gun Control.
With the school campus shootings that started my senior year in high school with Columbine, CO. to the every day shootings on the streets that are never mentioned in mass media, death by gun is an ever present thought these days. I can definitely understand the visceral level fear of a gun and having to face that. After the motorcycle accident there is that same type of fear just riding in a car. I have an idea of why. But I have to ask ...
Is more restrictive laws going to have the desired affect?
I am for laws, like them, love them, they ensure a certain level of predictable behavior. Yet I am not sold on the more laws concept. More laws means greater need for lawyers so that me as an average person can understand my rights and more importantly protect myself.
The following is the current gun laws as my understanding of them stands.
- You cannot have committed a certain level of crime and it is up to the proper agencies to notify each other. I do not know what level of crime as I am not one to willfully commit crimes and do my best to stay far on the side of legal as I can.
- To own a full automatic weapon you have to have a certain license that is relatively difficult to get and demands a very high level of personal accountability to include searches of the location you have the weapon/license registered to.
- If you have certain types of mental disorders you cannot own a fire arm. It is up to the doctors to make sure the proper agencies are notified.
- If you purchase a fire arm from a dealer you have to pass a back ground check that looks for criminal and mental health history.
It is a rather simple system and definitely easy to get around. As all it takes is one person selling their weapon privately to another person without a back ground check and you have a possible gun the in the wrong hands situation. Then you have the problem of non-communication between agencies setting up for a fire arm to get in the hands of someone who should not have it.
Where there is a will there is a way and fire arms represent a false sense of power and control. Which is what I think their draw is; power over another human being living or not. It scares us that our loved ones can be so easily taken from us, but yet we don't ban cars and texting even though vehicles take quite a few lives every year. Cars/automobiles/vehicles are not a symbol of power any more; they are a convenience and seen as needed for transportation.
With the vast majority of people not needing guns for survival (food gathering) and at the same time not needing them for defense it is easy to forget why the 2nd Amendment is needed. The 2nd Amendment is "supporting the natural rights of self-defense and resistance to oppression, and the civic duty to act in concert in defense of the state (Wikipedia)" Basically it is there for the right to protect ones self from the state.
What I find interesting is our recent slide of wanting the State to have more and more say in what is right and wrong (legal/Illegal). More and more people seem ok with their lives being dictated by a set of laws. Which I get this mind set as it allows for more predictable behavior patterns out of our neighbors. Yet this gun control controversy and the opioid controversy (next topic to write about) coupled with my recent accident has got me thinking about how many laws should we really have.
What type of laws should we have?
What the solution to the Fire Arm/Gun Control laws should be is very elusive to me. While I understand wanting your loved one to survive a gun shot; I ask myself also if we should save everyone, because what makes life precious is that it is short. While I understand being afraid of an object, it is really the unpredictability of the person wielding it that scares us and we really need to own up to that before writing more laws. That need to control others and our fear of unpredictability is what probably should be addressed first.
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