Gun control or the right to bear
arms… this ethical issue is something in which I feel surprisingly complacently
neutral. My understanding is also fairly rudimentary and I feel that there is
so much mudslinging on both sides that the waters are not clear enough to
discern fact or fiction when listening to televised debates and conversations,
after all just because it is said does not make it correct. So this is how I
initially started thinking about this issue: Some people have guns and others
do not. Some people like guns and others do not. Sometimes people fear what
they do not know or understand and this could be true for both sides of the
argument. Guns can be used to hurt people and hurting people is something I am
passionately against. Though anything can be used to hurt people, which is why
the definition of what constitutes a weapon has been expanded for when people
get creative. In fact, airplanes were involved in terrorism and glue and spray
paint are used as drugs, sadly even the most innocent seeming items can be
turned into something dangerous.
My experience with guns began
when I was ten and my dad bought me a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. Funny enough I
had not seen A Christmas Story until last year despite the fact it airs for
twenty-four hours on Christmas Eve almost every year without fail. I had very clear instructions that I was
never to touch this outside of my dad’s supervision and this is something I
honored. I loved going in the woods and shooting soda cans that we found off of
logs. A couple years ago a bunch of my friend’s and I got together and did some
target practice. I have several friends’ that have extensive training with guns
so they were teaching me and some of the other novices the proper handling and
use. I am virtually at sniper status with a .22 rifle (soda cans beware!), but I have no business
with a handgun. I do not feel capable that I would not shoot my own miniature
fingers off. This became one of my many concerns of why I did not want a gun in
my own home. I felt that an accident was more likely to occur, with my luck, than
the need to use it to protect myself. Eventually we settled on a shotgun and it
took a long time for me not to be paranoid that my cat was not going to make it
shoot the house, us, itself, the other cats, the dog etc. somehow magically,
you know because magic makes guns discharge…
One of my main qualms for forms
of gun control is that I am not a proponent of challenging the Constitution, if
our founding fathers felt it important enough to want to include this then
there has to be something with historical context that they felt we would be
disadvantaged not being able to bear arms. I have never lived in a time in
which this was not a freedom we had; I cannot imagine what it was like during
the creation of this law. My other issue is that when has banning anything ever
caused stopped anything. LaFollette and I were on the same page in terms of the
example of prohibition. Outlawing alcohol made it that much more of a commodity
with back channels, bootlegging, the rise of the speak easy, gangsters, and
crime. Anyone with alcohol was automatically a criminal. Illegal drugs are also
not sold on the open market, yet they exist. At this point trying to enforce
severe control or banishment would not mean the disappearance or use of guns,
though that is not a terrible idea at its core.
Ethically I feel like LaFollette
makes another good point that there is not really a need for bullets to be able
to pierce bulletproof vests. My frequent ethics argument is just because you
can do it doesn’t mean you should. So certain gun control actions could have
its benefits. Conversely, if someone other than the police are wearing Kevlar that
would make stopping the situation perhaps more difficult. So to get a little
more perspective I wanted to get both sides of the story from both gun proponents
and those that support gun control. Pratt makes a strong case in his blog that
schools like Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi were able to stop a
situation with the proper use of a gun before the situation escalated in 1997. Some
store owners during the LA riots kept their businesses standing while others
burned to the ground. This was attributed to the fact that they loaded down
their store with large capacity gun magazines for assault weapons (Pratt, 2012).
Pratt goes on to make note that in 2012 “all of the mass shootings that have
occurred in this country, with the exception of one, have taken place in
gun-free zones” (Pratt, 2012, para. 3). On the other hand, the Brady Campaign is
working diligently to ensure that guns are sold with a background check so that
they are not sold to fugitives, felons, of domestic abusers. While some, like
Pratt, are not so keen on the work of the Brady campaign as their vision is to
change gun laws, gun culture, and the gun industry.
Is it possible to meet in the
middle between making sure citizens are safe and can protect themselves when
chaos ensues simultaneously while controlling who can get a gun? That is a
large goal with a lot of conflict toward the other’s point of view. Ethically
it is hard to say that either is completely wrong or completely right. For now
I am still sticking with the opinion that taking something away doesn’t mean it
will go away or the problem will be solved. While there are differently places
on the scale that those who support gun control sit the answer is not to
completely take guns away. There is no indication in history that such a thing
has been successful.
References:
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun
Violence. (n.d.). Retrieved May 17, 2015, from http://www.bradycampaign.org/
LaFollette, H. (2007). The
Practice of Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
Pratt, E. (2012, December 19). Stricter Gun Control Laws Will Only Make
Citizens Less Safe. Retrieved May 17, 2015, from
http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/did-the-sandy-hook-shooting-prove-the-need-for-more-gun-control/stricter-gun-control-laws-will-only-make-citizens-less-safe
No comments:
Post a Comment