Handguns are Consumer Products
Gun violence has been all over the news again these last couple of weeks, and it has me feeling extremely upset and frustrated. It's one of those issues that bores deep into my brain and settles in. The solutions seem so obvious; so necessary. Yet, no solution is ever pursued with any real seriousness. Lip Service doesn't count as action. So two more kids were killed in the most recent high-school shoot-up, many others wounded, and the shooter's life essentially rendered a lost cause. A tragic story, but what are you gonna do?
To me, the most pathetic and inexcusable aspect of the situation is the fact that guns, and in particular handguns, are products manufactured by large, wealthy and influential companies and sold to the public and private sectors of society at an immense profit. An instrument that facilitates murder and suicide, making an irrevocable act as easy as applying pressure to a sliver of metal, is a product bought and sold like any other. When it comes to guns, we Americans seem proud of our arrogantly idiotic views. We point to the Constitution, despite the fact that the original Constitution also allowed slavery. Most Americans scoff at the very notion that a Constitutional Amendment regarding guns might be a healthy course of action. This attitude persists despite tens of thousands of gun deaths per year in the U.S.
Guns do not remain legal because they represent some sort of fundamental "right of man." No, they stay legal because at this point the gun industry, much like the tobacco or oil industries, is far too rich to give up a cent of profit without a hell of a fight. Before I go off on a moralistic tirade, let me pause to present some statistics.
(Note: the following statistics are from the Violence Policy Center and OpenSecrets.org)
First of all, guns kill a whole lot of Americans per year. According to the Violence Policy Center, more than 32,000 people were killed by gunfire in the U.S. in 1997. For every one justifiable homicide in the same year, there were 139 deaths due to murders, suicides, and unintentional accidents involving guns. Are the losses of 139 lives a fair trade-off for the protection of a few lives? So much for the myth that guns protect people from criminals. In fact, over half of the homicides involving guns in 1998 were committed by someone who was either related to, closely acquainted with, or knew their victim. Half of the female victims were killed by a husband or boyfriend.
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