It has been two months since the shooting occurred on Dec. 14 in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., just 40 miles from Wesleyan. Since then, debates around gun control have become prevalent in the media and political sphere. On Christmas, just one day after the shooting incident involving firemen in New York, I had a conversation with a family in Washington, D.C., during which the issue of gun ownership arose. The topic: should the government prohibit gun ownership?
In an effort to capitalize on the crisis of gun violence, media coverage on the gun shooting massacre was overwhelming and thus reignited the gun control debate. However, I would argue that the media and the public tend to overlook a key point: people with access to guns can defend others against gun violence. If the government implements a plan to ban guns in order to prevent mass violence from occurring, criminals will still have illegal access to weapons, leaving the innocent population unprotected. Completely banning guns would be simply counterproductive.
As I see it, the logic behind the Second Amendment is that our vigilance against tyrannical government is our first civic duty. The constitutional right to bear arms originates from fear of the government. However, nowadays, in the aftermath of those tragedies, people fear fellow citizens who have access to guns rather than the government. The reasoning behind the Second Amendment is a product of its time, when the founding fathers made the liberty of the people a critical priority.
How can the Constitution secure the liberty of the people without protecting their lives? If vigilance with regard to violent fellow citizens is our goal, then one can argue that the government should ban the ownership of weapons capable of producing violence on a mass scale, such as semi-automatic guns, and intensify the mental health screening of potential gun owners. For example, right after the Newtown shooting, a similar incident happened in an elementary school in Henan, China. The killer carried a knife and stabbed 23 students. The victims were wounded but none of them died. The result would have been much graver if the killer had carried a semi-automatic gun or similar assault weapon. Additionally, if any non-perpetrators on the scene had carried a pistol, the outcome could have been less deadly.
The debate over gun control is a natural reaction to tragedy; we can understand the grievance of victims’ families. However, it is important to note that the reexamination of the gun access issue should not depend solely on the emotional content of our reaction; it is equally crucial to understand that the media sensationalizes breaking news in order to draw an audience. Due to that need to sensationalize, the media clearly confuses the issue by exaggerating the gravity of the issue rather than clarifying it.
A weapons ban is not necessarily the solution to gun violence. Instead of instituting a complete ban on all guns, we should advocate a limit on assault weapons and reevaluate the process of determining who has access to guns.