Gun laws alone won't solve violent crime problem | GARY COSBY JR.
America has a problem with violent crime. That is clear. It is also clear that the overwhelming majority of those violent crimes are carried out using firearms, largely because those weapons are available and easy to use.
The Pew Research Center analyzed violent crime data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and found that in 2020, the most recent reporting year as of the publication of their report, a record 45,222 people died as a result of a firearms-related action. This accounted for both homicides and suicides.
Suicide usually accounts for slightly over half of all firearms-related deaths in a given year. In 2020, homicide accounted for 19,384 lives. The 45,222 persons killed with a firearm in either a murder or suicide in 2020 were the most since statistics began being kept in 1968.
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The highly vilified AR-15 and other so-called assault rifles and long guns were not usually the weapon of choice. Except in several of the highly-publicized mass shootings that have occurred, most murders are carried out with pistols. Those weapons are far more available, easier to use, and easier to conceal on one’s person than a rifle or shotgun.
Ammunition magazines for semiautomatic pistols are also very easy to use and very inexpensive to own. My handgun has magazines that hold 13 rounds, so I can shoot those rounds rapidly, dump the magazine at the push of a button, slam a new magazine in, and fire almost without any delay at all. Such features enable even a kid to perpetrate a mass shooting event quite easily.
To complicate matters, the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that pistols, as a class of weapon, may not be banned as they are a gun commonly used in home defense. That leaves us holding a pretty empty bag, so what do we do to get control of guns?
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That question points out the problem. Gun control isn’t solely about guns. It never has been. I went to a country high school where anyone with a pickup truck had a gun rack in it and proudly displayed his rifle or shotgun, even at school, and nobody got shot. So, the problem is not one that is exclusively about the hardware.
If we were upgrading a computer system, we would not simply keep installing new software onto old computers. We might do that for a while, but we would have to approach it from several angles; hardware, software, network, and users.
That is the only way we are ever going to bring the violence under control in this country. We cannot focus exclusively on guns. Congress should tighten up laws governing guns where they can, but that is only one step. We must also work on the user end.
There really does need to be some form of licensing requirement such as every state in America has in order to drive an automobile. People wishing to own a gun should have to pass a competency test with firearms, have a background check for each and every purchase, and take a mental health evaluation to be certified. All these things will help, but these measures still mostly affect people who already would be perfectly safe and legal gun owners.
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A licensing requirement would help in other ways, enabling police to confiscate what would immediately become illegal guns from people who are instantly illegal gun owners as they encounter them in the course of their duties.
But the solution does not stop there. America has lost its moral compass. Many of our traditional values have always come through the family unit. It used to be that guns and gun safety were handed down from fathers to sons and daughters who were taught to safely and effectively handle the weapons. The breakdown in family structure has removed fathers from the lives of too many children. Far too often, these kids get their firearms training from street gangs, friends who don’t know what they are doing, or from popular media and video games.
No one is teaching them the safe and responsible use of a firearm. Worse still, the value of human life normally taught in a family unit is supplanted by the blatant disregard for life taught them on the streets where no fathers or mothers are out supervising their children’s activities.
Our problem with violence will not disappear because we tighten up laws on guns, or by doing any of the other things above. It will only come under control if we as a society decide this is important enough to act on, important enough to train our children properly and demonstrate how to behave in front of them. As long as kids are learning how to behave from other kids who themselves have no moral anchor, we will never solve this problem.
Reasonable gun laws are only one step on a journey that we all must take in order to rein in the violence in our society.
Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Gun laws won't solve violent crime problem | GARY COSBY JR.
