Stop Blaming Guns for Mass Shootings

Originally posted on EpicTimes:

In 2015 alone, there have been over 350 mass shootings in America. Gun violence is at an all-time high. Only a few days have passed since the lass mass shooting and our second amendment rights are coming under fire now more than any other period in our history.

The left cries for stricter gun control laws, while Republicans cling to their guns and pray for the victims, but neither address the real issue. What we should be asking is, when did people become comfortable with killing each other?

In an article by Malcom Gladwell, he discusses school shootings and how they’ve changed over time like “a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot.” The threshold for carrying out horrific acts seems to decrease with each incident.

Think of how a riot develops: it begins when someone with a low “threshold of violence” decides to break a shop window; then, as it grows, people who wouldn’t otherwise participate —people with higher thresholds of violence—somehow become willing participants.

The fact that people can turn on their televisions or log onto a social media platform and have a front row seat to violent images, or watch blanket news coverage as incidents unfold, has made us as a society desensitized to the acts themselves. Violence is no longer something an anomaly in our day to day lives.  Whether it’s guns, domestic abuse, or bar brawls, violence has become a staple in America.

The latest shooting in San Bernadino, took place in a state with the most stringent gun control laws in the nation, and gun ownership is declining. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades.  In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; by 2010 that figure had dropped to one in five.

The truth is, the number of mass shootings pale in comparison to that of gun violence happening as a result of domestic violence. Over half of gun violence cases between 2009 and mid-2015 included a current or former intimate partner or family member of the attacker; and more than 2/3 of the shootings happened in a private residence.

In the wake of these tragedies, people want to point fingers and blame the gun lobby for having its hands gripped tightly around the throats of Congress. People advocate for tighter gun laws and would prefer to disarm the responsible gun owner instead of realizing the responsible gun owner isn’t the one who is committing these acts of violence.

The problem isn’t gun control, as a matter of fact, tighter gun control measures are widely supported on both sides of the aisle liberals and conservatives. The irony here is the same people calling for tighter gun control are the ones crying about the government being too controlling in other facets of their lives such as, data collection and NSA spying.

While the left calls for tighter gun control and more regulation, I’m going to take the alternate path and call for a stance against violence in any form, guns, knives, brass knuckles. Because let’s face it, if you remove guns from the mass shootings, violence would still be a main player, and the lives lost would still be in vain. The only difference would be the choice of weapon used to commit the act.

Gun control is only a microcosm of a much bigger issue, violence against our fellow human beings.