From a law-and-order standpoint, more guns means more murder. “States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides,” noted one exhaustive 2013 study in the American Journal of Public Health.
From a national-security standpoint, the Amendment’s suggestion that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State,” is quaint. The Minutemen that will deter Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are based in missile silos in Minot, N.D., not farmhouses in Lexington, Mass.
And now we have the relatively new and now ubiquitous “active shooter” phenomenon, something that remains extremely rare in the rest of the world. Conservatives often say that the right response to these horrors is to do more on the mental-health front. Yet by all accounts Stephen Paddock would not have raised an eyebrow with a mental-health professional before he murdered 58 people in Las Vegas last week.
What might have raised a red flag? I’m not the first pundit to point out that if a “Mohammad Paddock” had purchased dozens of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition and then checked himself into a suite at the Mandalay Bay with direct views to a nearby music festival, somebody at the local F.B.I. field office would have noticed.
Let's get one thing straight before I get into this: I have no problem with guns. Guns are fine. Do I want one? Yeah. Is it necessary? No. I understand that our government is super corrupt, and it would be pretty cool to have weapons of mass destruction if needed. Like most things, the second amendment is good in theory, but in reality- well, oof. While it is true that terrorists such as the Columbine shooters, Adam Lanza, and Stephan Paddock most definitely had terrible mental health, they wouldn't have committed the murderous crimes they did without the help of firearms. Also, in the time of the constitution, it took like 20 minutes (no, not really) to reload. Today, we have the miracle known as machine guns. Yuck. We seem to be the only country that has this problem- why is that? Oh yeah, gun control exists outside of The States. In summary, we should probably repeal the second amendment. In other news: at least the war on the environment is going well.
Jon Slavinskas- Unfortunately while a ban on guns should work in an ideal world, the thing about criminals who wish to harm others is that they are, in fact, criminals. So simply banning the sale of guns would be ineffective, as would extreme vetting. A more realistic solution is a limit to the number of bullets that are manufactured per magazine. This would still keep guns around as a more than viable option for domestic defense, and cut the statistical probability of mass shootings, especially if we limit the number of mags that can be manufactured.
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