The Gun Controversy - Misdirected Passion

I was watching a couple of videos on youtube about the recent V Tech massacre in Virginia last month. For those who are not familiar with it, it was a school shooting incident where Seung-Hi Cho, a university student, killed 32 people and wounded even more, making it one of the worst shooting incidents in modern history. Moreover, it happened in a university.

As expected, the incident sparked outrage all over the country, with Liberals using it as yet another incident to bolster their claims to buff the gun control laws in the country. Even though I identify myself as a Liberal minded person on most issues, here I do differ with them. Their anger is not pointed in the right direction, they have heavily politicised an issue which has caused deep emotional trauma for many people and they are cheapening the lives of the people who died that day for the sake of publicity.

Freedom has a price; you have to understand that if you value any kind of freedom. To think that we live in a free country today without realising that something this important comes with implications is absurd. For free speech the price is that we have to tolerate racists and haters. For freedom of religion we have to tolerate beliefs that differ from our own. If you want the right to assemble, you have to acknowledge that the Nazis and KKK can too.

Now, to protect yourself from clans and parties that abuse this freedom, you need to be armed. To protect yourself from the lunatics around you, you need to be armed. The price to protect freedom is sometimes tragic, like the V Tech massacre. However, is strengthening the gun laws really going to solve the problem? Do you really think that a deranged university student would not have killed those people if the laws had been stricter? If that lunatic really wanted to kill people and he could not get his hands on a gun, he would have used a knife or baseball bat or a crossbow or poison. However, we don’t see people campaigning for laws that prohibit crossbows and poison. Why? It would get them no publicity.

Does the shooter really care how many laws he is breaching? In the columbine incident (another tragic school shooting), at least 18 existing anti-gun laws were breached. Do you think the shooter would have cared if it was 18 or 1800? Stricter laws on guns have no effect on loonies.

People show me statistics of the amount of gun violence escalating not just in the US, but all over the world today. Where are the numbers for knife violence or murder by poison? If it is the act of murder that these people are against, they should be as opposed to alternative methods of killing a person as well. Yet, we see no outcry against that.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died because of cars, and there's no movement to ban them. Is the right to drive cars that much more important than protecting our freedom? Is my right to protect myself from lunatics like Seung-Hi Cho less important than your right to go for a drive in the beach?

Now, I understand the argument from the other side too. That, even though it is obvious that someone who is willing to commit a major crime like murder isn't likely to worry about a gun control law, the object of gun control is to make it hard for someone that's likely to commit a crime from getting a gun and even harder to get a gun capable of killing dozens of people. I get that argument and it makes perfect sense to me. However, what I am saying is that we have disregarded the underlying cause -The social factors that drive these lunatics to kill dozens of people.

If the passion that celebrities and commentators showed against guns was channelled into finding a way to deal with this underlying cause, the problem might be over by now. Both Hitler and Stalin had a moustache, but we cannot use that similarity to claim that it was the moustache which made them dictators. Likewise, these people did not commit these murders merely because they possessed a gun, the reason is elsewhere.

We tackle that problem and we make things better instead of defying logic just to make a political statement. Remember, a lunatic is far more dangerous than a gun. You always know when a gun is a gun, but you never know when a person is a lunatic.