Gun Control Article

      When I was growing up, my mother was very protective when it came to guns. Before my brother and I would go to somebody’s house for a play date, my mother would go to that house beforehand to make sure there were not any guns there. She, like most parents across this country, was concerned for the safety of her children. Luckily for her, her two sons did not experience the horrors of gun violence. Unfortunately this cannot be said for 20 families in Newtown, Connecticut.

            I was convinced that the Newtown massacre would change things, that things would finally be different. I was wrong. Just recently the Senate rejected a measure to expand background checks to guns sold online and at gun shows. Although 54 Senators voted for it, it needed 60 votes in order to overcome the Republican-led filibuster. But I don’t just blame the Republicans for filibustering gun control, I blame all the Democrats who voted against it (except for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who voted against it as a procedural move in order to bring the bill back up again in the future). 

            Even though 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks for gun purchases (including a vast majority of gun owners), the bill was defeated mostly because of the fear of the NRA. Yet the NRA is not as powerful as people think it is. In the recent presidential election, less than one percent of the candidates they endorsed were elected. They also raised just $12 million during that election, which is a small pittance compared to the $100 million that Karl Rove’s American Crossroads raised.

            Opponents of gun control are totally wrong when talking about the second amendment. It was written at a time when there were no national military or state militias, a time when the only guns people had were muskets that could only shoot one bullet at a time. The founding fathers could not have foreseen a military-style assault weapon that could murder 26 people in the span of five minutes, nor could they comprehend over 2,000 people in this country being killed by gun violence within just a few months. Right after Newtown, NRA President Wayne LaPierre said that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. But I think it would make more sense to make sure that the bad guy does not have access to the gun in the first place.