As a student at a school of medicine and public health, I felt compelled to write about gun control, especially in light of recent events. The lack of strict gun control in the United States is a public health crisis.
In a recent Time article, Fareed
Zakaria eloquently argued for gun control. He reports that the gun
homicide rate per capita in the United States is 30 times higher than in Britain and Australia, 10 times higher than
in India, and four times higher than in Switzerland! Why is this? Is it
possible that the United States has more people that are psychologically
debilitated? This seems unlikely. The answer appears to be the number of guns.
In the United States there are 88.8 firearms per 100 people compared to 54.8 in
Yemen, 45.7 in Switzerland, 45.3 in Finland, and all other countries have fewer
than 40. Zakaria also reports that crime in America has significantly decreased in the past
few decades with the exception of one category of crime: firearm homicides, whose
rate has not changed in the past few decades.
Critics
claim that gun control is unconstitutional, namely because it violates the 2nd
Amendment’s right to bear firearms. To that, I urge you to consider the initial
motivation behind the 2nd Amendment and the ruling by the
Supreme Court in United States v. Miller. The actual text of the 2nd
Amendment is as follows: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security
of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be
infringed.” Note the word “militia,” which the Supreme Court explained to mean
a group of people enrolled for military discipline, and that when they were
called for service they would appear bearing arms supplied by themselves. Therefore,
the 2nd Amendment refers to bearing arms in the military intended
for the protection of the country, not bearing arms for private purposes. The
Supreme Court seriously overstepped when they
declared in District of Columbia v. Heller that the 2nd Amendment
protects an individual’s right to bear a gun.
Critics
also claim that gun control will not decrease gun violence or even violence in
general. People will still be able to obtain guns on the black market. Also, there
will still be just as much crime, but the only difference is that people will
use weapons other than guns. However, this argument is not cogent. Having
a gun in the home allows you to act on impulse and to complete an act that you
might not have otherwise done.
An article in the Journal of Epidemiology
reported that people with guns in the home were at a greater
risk than those without guns of dying from a homicide in the home. Furthermore,
according to an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, most people who
commit suicide are ambivalent about doing so.
Having a gun makes it so much easier for people to commit suicide if they are
ambivalent.
For the
health and safety of our country, our leaders would be wise to enact stricter
gun control laws. The risks gun control are very minimal, or perhaps nonexistent,
because doing so will only decrease gun violence. The only downside of gun
control is that our freedom is slightly limited, to which I respond by saying
that sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the greater good.