Gun control is not the answer

ART By MAyA cAMPBELL

MAyA cAMPBELL

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” This is a common talking point of conservatives when defending less restriction on gun laws. Although most liberal people quickly refute this point, it has more validity than most people realize.

Gun control has long been considered a liberal, fair and progressive policy that helps underrepresented groups and harms oppressors. However, gun control’s true nature is not a pretty one.

Gun control has inherently racist origins, and to this day, it continues to perpetuate racism towards Black Americans. However, most Americans, both conservative and liberal, either refuse to acknowledge this or are ignorant of it entirely. Most liberal people fully support strict gun legislation. Still, gun control is not effective enough to be widely used throughout the U.S. Instead of focusing on restricting guns, we should put our energy into prevention measures such as mental health and welfare services.

While gun control is not inherently racist, its enforcement is where the racism comes in. ‘Stop and frisk’ policies have disproportionately affected Black people for years, and in a 2019 NYPD report, 69% of people stopped were Black. More Black people being stopped means that statistically, more Black people are charged with carrying a weapon, resulting in higher rates of black arrests. “If you have a white, upper-middle-class guy carrying a gun versus a Black, inner-city young man carrying a gun, which one is going to be

stopped? The Black man. The white man, who is guilty of the same offense, gets away with it, and no one ever knows,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at The University of California Los Angeles who specializes in gun control.

The debate over gun control also has many parallels to the abortion debate. Full support for abortion is a common liberal policy of today, but funnily enough, support for gun control skews the opposite direction.

“When I ask my students about guns, most of them being liberal, imminently claim full support for extremely strict gun control. However, once I bring up keeping the same strictness on abortion, immediately I hear discourse over bodily autonomy and rights,” Winkler said.

Both sides of the debate claim restriction of abortion or gun control is an infringement on their rights. Despite that, concerning guns, it is often brought up that gun violence is too prevalent to cut down on gun restrictions. However, how effective is gun control in stopping gun violence?

To answer this question, one can look back to the abortion debate. If abortions are outright banned, people will result to obtaining them illegally. This same logic can be applied to gun control; “Gun trafficking is a huge issue, and I think it’s more important to crack down on that than to ban assault rifles,” Winkler said.

Gun trafficking is illegally selling guns, and as gun restrictions go up, so does the rate of gun trafficking. Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean people won’t do it. Gun violence is illegal but look at the state of our country now. It is marked by mass shootings, with 20,000 people killed by guns in 2020 alone. So, what can we do? Is our country beyond saving?

The answer lies in prevention and harm reduction. More mental health outreach in poor, marginalized communities can prevent the circumstances that lead to gun violence from happening in the first place. According to Everytown Research, over 60 in 100 gun deaths are a result of suicide. Therefore, mental health outreach will get to the root of many gun deaths and stifle the problem at the source. Another thing that can help curb gun violence is more education on safe gun procedures and storage, which can help prevent accidental gun death and child access to guns.

Overall, gun violence is one of the most pressing issues in American society today. The natural response is the full-scale restriction of the perceived problem: guns. However, people need to realize that the problem of gun violence isn’t as simple as an assault rifle ban.

ART By ANDREW SHU