Guns Don’t Contribute to Society

Mr. and Ms. America, Turn in Your Guns
By Cutter Kilgore / April 24, 2012

My mother, Kelly, shot herself in the head on a balmy June Sunday when I was 12 years old. She bought a handgun easily and died young.

I don’t blame gun laws for human decisions, but the problem with guns, aside from being too readily accessible, is that they’re only designed for one purpose: to kill.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Guns don’t contribute to society. They don’t staple together papers or loft our shots onto the green. What they do is make killing easy, and nobody needs killing to be easy.

The solution to gun violence is not to provide Americans with easy-access to firearms in order to fend off gun-toting criminals. That experiment has failed.

Citizens need guns? Why? Do good decisions arise out of perpetual fear?

Regardless of whether you feel safer with a gun nearby, statistics continually show a direct and blatant correlation between gun availability and gun death rates.

Often ignored by pro-gunners is another, even sadder side of this dreary issue. Suicides and accidental gun death account for more than half of the total annual gun-related fatalities in this country. So what, it doesn’t matter if people only shoot themselves? What an appalling and shockingly callous sentiment.

A prevalent notion amongst pro-gun advocates is one of self-defense and vigilante justice spawned from action movie clichés: Guns make heroes who shoot bad guys and prevent robberies and murders!

Please.

Rather, they make it effortless for honest citizens to become murderers. Right, George Zimmerman?

Humans aren’t so neatly segregated as victim or criminal, good and bad. Life is never so monochrome, so let’s not take the law into our own untrained hands.

How can more guns be the answer to halting firearm death rates? It’s counterintuitive.

How many Trayvon Martin tragedies are too many? How many Virginia Tech massacres? Haven’t we had enough?

The Second Amendment states that an armed militia is necessary to maintain a free state. But this isn’t 1791 anymore, and that just isn’t true today.

My mother’s ashes are scattered on an island that can be reached only by boat. She’s nestled under a tree in a place that smells, to me, like summer.

But let me be clear: I don’t blame gun laws for human decisions, only for providing such attainable means.

Source / Whatcom Community College Horizon

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