Gun control doesn’t work. The following four reasons why gun control won’t solve America’s violence problems and rationale are from conservativedailynews.com.
The idea that the solution to American violence is more laws restricting guns is absurd. Indeed, any statistical connection between gun policy and violence is weak.
1. Suicide is the Central Problem of American Gun Violence
Visit the statistics page of the website for the anti-gun group Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and you’re immediately confronted with an enormous banner: “38,000 AMERICANS DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR—AN AVERAGE OF 100 PER DAY.” However, that banner omits the fact that most of those deaths are suicides.
A report in the Harvard Political Review noted that suicides accounted for nearly two-thirds of 2019’s gun deaths.
Can gun control be part of a suicide prevention strategy?
Virtually any sort of firearm would suffice to take one’s own life, as well as other means. So, there’s no hypothetical in which popular gun control proposals like an “assault weapons ban” or magazine capacity restriction would make a difference concerning suicide.
Attempting to stop suicide by imposing gun control is like trying to stop drunk driving by banning cars: it’s a completely implausible “solution” that elides the actual problem at hand.
2. Partner & Familial Violence Are Huge Parts of the Problem
The “boogeyman” of the gun control lobby is the proverbial “mass shooter,” some deranged, antisocial individual who carries a “military-style” rifle into an ostensibly safe place, like a school or grocery store, and indiscriminately slaughters innocent people. He often has hateful or bigoted motivations for this act.
While such shootings do happen, they are incredibly rare and account for a vanishingly small proportion of the homicides that the U.S. experiences in a given year. Per 2019 FBI data, just 2.6% of homicides are carried out using a rifle. In fact, clubs and bare fists are used to kill more people annually than rifles. And of the mass shootings that we do see, many are gang-related.
Now, consider these facts: almost two-thirds of child murder victims are killed by their own parents. Nearly half of all female murder victims are killed by their partners or ex-partners.
And while it’s common knowledge that most victims of homicide are killed by someone they know, a surprisingly large proportion are killed by an actual family member.
Conservatively, a given homicide victim is about five times more likely to have been killed by a family member than killed with any sort of rifle.
Organizations that help women to escape dangerous relationships or address other aspects of domestic violence are poised to do much more good than organizations with broad and quixotic disarmament missions.
3. Gun Control is Alcohol Prohibition All Over Again
The failure of the United States’ 20th century experiment with alcohol prohibition has been well-documented.
One harmful side effect: the nation’s homicide rate increased over 40% during Prohibition. The violence was especially pronounced in large cities, which experienced a homicide rate increase of nearly 80%.
Fortunately, Americans realized that the costs of Prohibition were too high. Repealing Prohibition was the clear solution. With the ratification of the 21st Amendment, the nation’s homicide rate dropped precipitously, falling to well below pre-Prohibition levels within just a few years.
The War on Drugs, likewise, was fought to make our communities safer, but it has in fact made them more violent.
Noah Smith (who’s certainly no champion of gun rights), writing for The Atlantic, observed:
Legal bans on drug sales lead to a vacuum in legal regulation; instead of going to court, drug suppliers settle their disputes by shooting each other. Meanwhile, interdiction efforts raise the price of drugs by curbing supply, making local drug supply monopolies (i.e., gang turf) a rich prize to be fought over. And stuffing our overcrowded prisons full of harmless, hapless drug addicts forces us to give accelerated parole to hardened killers.
In short: Gun Control would be Alcohol Prohibition all over again.
4. Guns Don’t Beget Violence, Poverty and Despair Do
Poverty and lack of opportunity are strongly associated with violence.
That’s fairly obvious if you simply look at the geographic and demographic distributions of violence in America, as explained here.
Most people will readily accept that poverty and despair are associated with violence. However, they may see the problem of poverty as impossibly vexing and intractable, while implementing stricter gun laws might seem more feasible by comparison.
But that’s a mistake. You may refer back to this breakdown to see why the “get rid of the guns, get rid of the gun violence” narrative is simplistic, not simple.
Moving Beyond Tired Gun Control Narratives
Gun control can’t solve our problems. If we want to get serious about addressing violence in America, there are many more promising areas to focus on. For example, concentrate on mental health care, assistance for battered spouses and family members, and addressing poverty and despair–again, mental health care.
