RICHMOND, VA (Catholic Online) – The scenario is all too familiar. The nation is aghast over a psychopathic 20-year old who entered a school and systematically killed some 28 people, including himself. The usual group of anti-gun advocates followed the admonition of one of their leaders, Rahm Emmanuel, not to "waste a crisis" and were calling for stricter gun control laws before the assailant’s guns had cooled. A teary eyed President said he felt "overwhelming grief" at the tragedy and promised "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this". Could this have been a reference to his own anti-gun agenda to which the horror in Connecticut will add considerable fuel?
But let us look for a moment at the underlying logic of the anti-gun position, which is that guns equal killing; if you own a gun, you will go on a rampage and kill innocent people. Estimates vary on the number of guns and gun owners in the United States, but a rough average would be approximately 80 million people in the US own about 250 million guns. So, although one person went on a rampage Friday, another 80 million people did not. The odds, therefore, of a gun owner committing an atrocity like the one in Connecticut are actually rather small.
Gun sales are currently at an all-time high, and the message of the anti-gunners is that with more guns there will be more crime. The facts, however, do not support this basic assumption. In fact, US violent crime rates that soared for 30 years from the early 1960s have decreased markedly since 1993. Last December the FBI reported that murder and other violent crime rates fell again by 6.4% during the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. It would appear that increased gun ownership does not lead to increased crime, and in fact the reverse may be true.
The problem with gun control is that it does not address the real problem. As the well-known cliché says, "Guns don’t kill people; people kill people". Interestingly, the same day the attack was carried out in Connecticut, a knife-wielding man attacked 22 students and a teacher at a school in central China in another of a series of similar assaults which killed 18 children in 2010. Clearly the problem is not restricted to the use of guns, nor is it restricted to the US. At this point, the anti-gun Left wants a "dialogue" about this problem. That dialogue must begin with the recognition of the real cause of the problem – evil, the evil that is associated with and caused by the culture of death that has taken over our nation.
In this sort of moral vacuum, where even the most precious and basic freedom, that of life itself, is no longer respected, a society that is increasingly violent and barbaric is bound to arise. We see the effects of that culture daily, and that is the real problem we face. Even if all the guns in the world suddenly disappeared, the carnage would not cease. The Chinese assailants had no guns, the Aztecs had no guns, and Planned Parenthood uses no guns. Perhaps the boy in Connecticut who killed his mother thought that if the law permitted his mother to kill him in, or on the way out of, her womb, he should have the same right. Indeed, some radicals have already said that this no-fault killing period should extend into infancy.
If we truly want to prevent further school shootings in this nation, we need to stop fooling ourselves with utopian "feel good" solutions
