Gun legislation needed to prevent mass shootings
For anyone who is concerned, I am a liberal-progressive with no interest in taking away American citizens’ guns. Having said that, can we talk?
Mass shootings in America are weekly events, and the most horrific of them occur multiple times a year. They are not, however, tragedies in the order of natural disasters completely outside our control. They are events that we as American citizens continue to accommodate and facilitate. An old proverb says, ‘Without vision, the people perish.’ Every year, our nation’s lack of creative vision causes someone’s loved one — mother, father, partner, child, friend — to perish at the end of a barrel, while traumatizing multitudes of people and conditioning millions of others into acceptance of the events. Mass shootings, inherent to their seeming randomness and frequency within a supposed safe space, shred the trust that holds societies and communities together.
I am a solutions-oriented person, recognizing that no solution will eliminate mass shootings altogether. Yet, we need to develop out of the box ideas. There are many things we could accomplish legislatively that would not take guns away from the citizenry. As an example, when a person uses another’s gun to commit a mass shooting (a situation that has tragically happened several times in our schools), the nation needs laws that aggressively prosecute and punish the gun’s owner. Responsible, safe storage is a foundational aspect of gun ownership, and whether through negligence or intent, the gun’s owner had a role to play. Mandatory minimum prison sentences would be a good start. The era in which minors are able to obtain a parent’s gun and commit mass murder in a school, with no repercussions for the gun’s owner, must end. This would certainly not stop all mass shootings, but it could reduce their number.
Fundamental to creative gun legislation is the belief that if we are going to continue to be a gun-owning society, we must become a responsible gun-owning society. Our culture and our laws must reflect the gravity of gun ownership. For the sake of all our lives, we need creative vision from citizens and political leaders, specific ideas that are outside the simplistic "pro-gun" and "anti-gun" binary. We need unique solutions that engage people across party lines. Let’s start talking about them.
Travis Marler lives in Springfield.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Gun legislation needed to prevent mass shootings
