Some Thoughts On Gun Control From Stuprendan

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Some Thoughts On Gun Control From Stuprendan

My brother Stuprendan came to visit me last Friday in Brooklyn, and we got to talking about his high school midterms, which he had just finished. He told me he had been up until 2am the night before writing a term paper on gun control. The paper was 12 pages long, and it argued heavily for gun control—which is unsurprising, considering that my family is firmly anti-guns. 

When we first moved into the house where my family lives, there were two hunters that would set up camp on the edge of the property. They had been given permission to do so by the family before us, but my mother didn’t like them being there.

They didn’t even hunt with guns—they used crossbows and arrows—but my mother was afraid that one day, we’d be playing in the woods, and they’d actually mistake us for deer. That was entirely possible, considering that she encouraged us to spend most of our time outdoors—we had camps and tree houses all over the place, buried deep in the woods, where we would eat onion grass and pretend to survive the apocalypse. She asked them to leave. They snuck in through the entrance to the park adjacent to our driveway. Finally, after a few calls to the local police station, they disappeared for good.

If you were a mother with four young children, you probably would have felt the same way—how could you feel comfortable letting your children play outside when there were men in fatigues sitting in trees, waiting to shoot moving objects? Now imagine that the crossbow is a semi-automatic gun, and the woods are a more populated area, and you want to protect someone you love. You can start to see how insane it is to say that people should have such automatic rifles, even if they’re used solely for hunting. 

But back to Stuprendan. I asked him to tell me the arguments he had made against guns, because given that he had done some research, he automatically knew more than me on the topic. The most interesting thing he said is that when the amendment was passed in the 18th century, the government was a revolutionary force, with very few resources. The language applies specifically to that moment—the moment when people still had to load muskets to shoot. In sort of scary terms, now that the United States government is incredibly well armed, with things like nuclear bombs and drones, the idea that citizens can arm themselves against it equally is ridiculous. Even if that’s not a good thing, it still makes the language of the amendment complete nonsense—if someone can drop a bomb on your head while you walk into the gas station, what good will your assault rifle do when you rise against them? The justification for having one thus disappears. I just wrote far more than I should have. But I asked Stuprendan to distill his paper down into a post on gun control for me, because I was interested in what he has to say. I’m very proud of him. His thoughts are below.

In the 18th century, the Second Amendment was added to the bill of rights for the primary purpose of allowing the anti-federalists the means to uprise against the federal government if it came to that point. Now, in our current society gun promoters are using the Second Amendment as a justification to stockpile whatever dangerous weapons they chose. The real intention of the amendment, however, was to provide the citizens of America with right to rebel against an oppressive government.

When the National Rifle Association was founded in 1870, they never once mentioned the Second Amendment as one it’s causes. Only later did they conveniently adopt the Second Amendment into the arguments for more lenient gun control.  
Although the amendment does allow for a “well-regulated militia,” in this day and age it is inconceivable that the private citizens of this country would be able to muster together a force that would even come close to rivaling the United Sates military. America’s armed forces have advanced weapons — nuclear missiles to drones — that are not available to the public.

Many right-wing gun activists feel that nuclear weapons should not be freely distributed among different countries because the risk of of them falling into the wrong hands is too great. The same can be said for assault rifles or pistols with high capacity rounds; they should not be distributed and sold because if they do fall into the wrong hands, there will be devastating outcomes.

No one should decide to do nothing, and not attempt to be a part of the solution to our our country’s gun problems. Promoting bans on assault rifles and other military grade weapons will help to get these firearms off the streets. It is not a valid excuse to simply claim that somehow people will always find access to guns. We have bans on chemical weapons and explosives because of their potential to kill large numbers of people, even if does not necessarily prevent every terrorist attack.   
We may give our attention to mass shootings, but our country’s issue with guns is a daily problem. Just one week after the tragedy in Newton, the Huffington Post estimated that there had been one hundred gun related deaths in America. Wether we like to think about it or not, guns have become a pressing problem for all of us.

Governor Cuomo took the first brave steps towards gun reform, banning high capacity rounds and assault rifles in New York, and hopefully others will follow his example. We don’t have to tackle the gun problem all at once, but we do need to slowly chip away at it, passing one bill at a time. Throughout the fight for a safer America, with tougher gun control laws,  it is important not to waver in your beliefs. You can’t rely on others to be your voice, even if leaving it to others seems like the easiest thing to do. The most meaningful things in life are the hardest to accomplish at first, but end up to be the most rewarding in the end. It is important to remember that whenever a gun is picked up, there is seldom a happy ending.