Reason applied: “The time has come to abolish the Second Amendment”
By Quinton Bradley Smith
Recently, The Independent published an article by Ed Kociela that posed the question: “What’s more important, the right to bear arms or thou shalt not kill?” My first inclination was to unleash an unholy tirade on whether or not he actually believes any of the Ten Commandments are from a divine source or if he just uses them as inflammatory mechanisms to drive social media participation. But having agreed with Ed Kociela on several of his social and economic stances, I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt and attack the logic behind his argument, or rather what I see as the lack thereof.
Ed Kociela is not off the mark in having concerns about gun violence. Even locally, there are enough gun-related tragedies to take guns very seriously, maybe more seriously than we already do. In Utah, there were more gun-related deaths than car-accident-related deaths. Now, most of those gun-related deaths occurred in the commission of suicide, and we, the majority — or as the left and Ed Kocielas of the world like to call us, the “Peanut Gallery” — don’t really start arguing about “gun control” until we have a mass shooting. The rest of the time, we try not to argue against gun control nuts, because there’s no point. There is no problem, and there is really no one exploiting tragedy until we experience a mass shooting.
The year of tragic notoriety
The year 2019 has been a bad summer as far as publicized gun violence goes. Even though some of the most heinous acts of gun violence happened in prior years, 2019 is a campaign year. The reason I’m not going to list the names of the shooters here is because some scientists believe notoriety is the problem, and I agree. Mass media have been linked to the reason why these psychopaths commit these crimes. That’s not my opinion. This is coming from the camp arguing man-made climate change.
Reporters need to show self-restraint
Even though I have every right to share each of these mass-shooting stories, set up links to the shooter’s manifestos, and promote or endorse my political beliefs based on these horrible people’s acts, I will not. The reason why I will not say or share the names of the accused criminals is well stated in an article by NPR, “Researchers believe mass violence is contagious.” Regardless, additional forms of government control are not proven methods to correct any of the problems they attempt to correct.
Speech control
The general population has access to automatic weapons; gun control won’t cure that over night. In fact, according to researchers, these mass shootings are studied within the category of “mass violence.” They are contagious! And this contagion is in large part spread by mass media. The real answer is found in the First Amendment, not the Second Amendment. It’s not a “right to bear arms” problem; it is a “freedom of speech” problem. But the fact of the matter is that when it’s the First Amendment on the chopping block, mass shootings are not really as big of a problem as the media would have you believe — in fact, in very literal terms, mass shootings are a make-believe problem being made real by the First Amendment. People who exercise their voice as much as Ed Kociela would probably never give up their right to free speech, no matter how many lives are saved. Or they wouldn’t be able to use that right to preach how we should abolish the Second Amendment.
Pretense crisis
For the sake of argument, let us pretend that our nation is in a mass-shooting crisis. Let us pretend that gun deaths in America outnumber overdose deaths. Let’s pretend that automobile accidents and heart disease don’t severely outnumber murder-related gun deaths, and let’s make believe that we have a gun violence crisis on our hands.
Any solution to correcting that “crisis” must honestly attempt to correct the crisis, and that is why gun control is a make-believe answer to this make-believe problem. Government crisis controls have never worked.
Drug control didn’t work
Sixty-eight thousand people overdosed and died last year. Decades of drug regulation drafted due to countrywide “drug control” in the form of the war on drugs haven’t stopped that from happening. It only gets worse every year. Why would more gun regulations help this make-believe crisis from becoming a real crisis? Since drug control, drugs have become a real crisis now that people are afraid to get help because they are worried about the government seizing everything they own and taking their freedom.
Car control
We have several agencies regulating vehicle operation, “car control” if you will, and in 2018 an estimated 40 thousand people still died in automobile accidents. Over 200 of those car-accident-related deaths were in Utah; most of those accidents happened in the Salt Lake City area.
Gun insurance
One of the answers to this make-believe problem is mandatory government enforced gun insurance. How will mandatory gun insurance stop gun violence when auto insurance does nothing to stop auto accidents? We are forced to have auto insurance because we are forced to operate our vehicles around other vehicles. There are several thousands of fender-benders with financial liability belonging to the at-fault party. While gun accidents do happen, the frequency at which they happen are nowhere near the amount of auto accidents.
And when a driver drove a van into pedestrians intentionally in Toronto, it turned out that auto insurance had no responsibility for covering the damages. Even if those here-unnamed gunmen of these recent atrocities had mandatory liability insurance for their weapons, there is no reason to believe that the victims would receive financial compensation from the insurance companies. That is clearly another crock of shit. So if there was a real problem, gun control in the form of mandatory liability insurance would not address it.
Once is too many times
Ed Kociela is right. If abolishing the Second Amendment might save lives, it would be worth it. If people wouldn’t still kill each other in different ways, it would be worth it. If criminals would also surrender their weapons, it would be worth it. If.
Fortunately for everyone, these occurrences of mass gun violence are quite rare. One mass shooting is far too many mass shootings. But any mass shooting that happens is exacerbated and intensified as it is played, shared, and retold through every form of media known to us. It is done so that we all get a taste of the tragedy and share in the pain and fear of the victims. We are all rightfully given a chance to send our well wishes and our deepest prayers to the victims and offer other substantial help when and where we are able. And we have the right to a free and fair press and the freedom of speech. We have the right to know what is going on in the world around us. Still, it is very unlikely that we will be caught in an active shooter situation. Yet according to researchers, that chance goes up and down based on the media’s saturation of past analogous situations.
If these instances of mass gun violence do become so frequent that they become a real problem, the answer will have very little to do with abolishing the Second Amendment. The real answer will be to somehow control our freedom of speech. And at that point, for me at least, the solution is more of a problem than the original problem ever was.
My heart goes out to you, Ed Kociela, for the loss of your cousin and father to guns. I lost my father a couple years back to an opium drip after a lifetime of oppressive poverty. I think that, in a way, we lost our fathers for the same reason: One got a button and the other a trigger.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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