In the time since the Newtown shooting, the debate on gun control has raged in the United States. The President has introduced a proposal barring assault rifles, and our own governor has rammed an extremely controversial bill down the throat of the state of New York. Liberals everywhere are screaming that the removal of guns from society will end the violence in America. But these liberals seem to be living in a dream world. While such shootings are certainly tragic and terrible, of the 564,452 homicides in the U.S. since 1982, only 543 people were killed in mass shootings. To be more clear, these mass shootings that will supposedly be stopped by the assault-rifle ban make up roughly 0.1% of American homicides. Hardly the end of violence. But while it will do little, if anything, to decrease violence, these gun bans will have a great effect on the reduction of the freedom of law-abiding American citizens.
Many liberals seem to think that guns are the problem in American society, that if people didn’t have access to guns, there would be no violence, and everyone would live in peaceful harmony. This is simply not true. The problem is human nature. There will always be people who wish to harm others, there will always be psychos and bullies and, even without guns, they will find a way to hurt people. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people and wounded 800 more. How many of those evil assault weapons did he need? Zero. He used fertilizer. A deadly bomb can basically be built from the items under your kitchen sink. In America, many more people are killed with knives than in mass shootings. In 2010 alone, 1,775 homicides were committed with knives. There were 555 “blunt object” murders in the U.S. in 2010. As Britain’s Prince Philip once said, “If a cricketer suddenly decided to […] batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, are you going to ban cricket bats?”
Gun control laws will not stop the vast majority of murders committed by gun, anyway. How many violent criminals go to their local gun shop, fill out a background check, and wait thirty days to receive their firearm to kill a rival? The simple fact is that with the exception of the very few psychos that acquire their guns legally, the only people these laws would be affecting are those who follow the laws.
These guns, assault rifles, and the like are used for more purposes than shooting up movie theaters. Many rational people use them for defense from those who wish to commit harm to them and their families. And assault rifles and the other weapons mentioned in all of these bans are the ideal weapons to keep in one’s house to protect one from an armed invader, who will most certainly not be following the laws. Realistically, a bolt action .22 in the hands of a law-abiding citizen isn’t going to be very useful against a home invader with a MAC-10. In addition, legal assault weapons, despite their bad reputation, commit an absurdly low percentage of America’s gun murders. The fact is that denying law-abiding people these weapons denies them the right to defend themselves adequately. Studies show that people keeping these weapons in their home actually deters crime. In Switzerland, each man is issued a fully automatic assault rifle to keep in his home. Switzerland has some of the lowest gun-murder rates in the world, much lower than gun-less paradises such as Australia. As Robert Heinlein once said, an armed society is a polite society.
Many gun control propositions, such as the background check and review of private gun sales, are perfectly reasonable. Despite the fact that very few of these legal-gun owners commit shootings, we must to the best of our ability make sure that these guns to not get into the wrong hands. But it is a massive obstruction of freedom to block the right of law-abiding people to defend themselves. Guns will get into the wrong hands despite the new laws, and violence will occur; therefore people must have the right to defend themselves adequately. Because as it is often said, if guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns.