By Joe Angelino
Sun Contributor
Once again the United States is reeling from yet another mass shooting incident. The murders last week in Las Vegas set a new record high for the amount of families in misery because of the senseless death of a loved one. The Vegas shooting left me anxious because I have family members living in Gambling Capitol of the World. Not until my early morning text message was answered with “we’re all okay” did my heart beat normally.
Since the Vegas concert shooting, the media pundits are all talking at a fever pitch for and against gun control laws, new regulations and outright bans on firearms, like they do after every one of these terrible crimes. All the opinions on the networks are from those on the far right and the far left of the issue, making for good TV banter whipped up by journalists for ratings, but they are just spinning their wheels.
Common horse sense that tells me the outright ban on firearms is never going to happen. It’s too late for that by about 80 years. The last best opportunity to attempt a gun ban would have been when gangsters were roaming the mid-west with fully automatic Tommy Guns. The National Firearms Act of 1934 had some public support because of the carnage being wrought by the criminal classes, especially when photographs of the Chicago St Valentine’s Day Massacre were published. Even after four U.S. Presidents were assassinated, all shot with firearms, there has never been attempts to confiscate civilian weapons and there’s a reason; there’s no practical way to do it with our current Constitution without causing another revolution.
The United States population is over 300 million people and, coincidently there are over 300 million firearms in the USA. The number of firearms possessed increases by over one million per year which outpaces population growth. Most of the firearms are legally owned and found in about 1 out of 3 homes, often in rural areas. About half the adult population owns at least one firearm. There’s also a large amount of illegally possessed firearms, both long guns and hand guns, which are difficult to quantify because, well, they’re illegal. If the government waved a magic wand requiring all firearms to be voluntarily turned in, I predict none of the criminals would hand over their weapons and maybe one-third of the legally owned weapons would be surrendered. That would leave millions of firearms still in circulation.
Because it is not practical or possible to collect firearms, maybe we should focus our time, energy and treasure on other ways to stop the killing with firearms. At this point the commentary may be grisly to some, but it’s necessary to get my point across. Mass shootings in crowds, at schools, malls and work places happen with too much frequency. These crimes receive a huge amount of press coverage, tugging at our hearts and emotions and there’s the problem, our emotions. We want these crimes that kill so many people to stop, so we turn to our government to make laws preventing future similar events. This hasn’t been working. Maybe we should first look elsewhere and possibly inward if we really want to save large numbers of people from firearms death.
