ZU Magazine is a publication of ZU Media. Below is an article from Issue 3: Freedom.
Zu News Editor-in-Chief | Jamie Roebuck-Joseph
Country singer Jason Aldean was mid-song when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd full of concert-goers at the annual Route 91 Harvest in Las Vegas. The tragic attack left 58 people dead and over 500 injured.
Paddock fired hundreds of rifle rounds from his Mandalay Bay suite on the 32nd floor. As videos and photographs of the aftermath appeared across various social media platforms, the visual chaos left the nation irate.
For now, the massacre seems to have been forgotten. Headlines about the attack have dwindled.
According to a CNN article published Oct. 2 entitled “Americans want strict gun laws after mass shootings. Then their interest fades,” the public is generally enraged when mass shootings occur, but stricter gun laws never get passed in Congress.
A month since the attack, the analysis of the Second Amendment has been a topic in and out of mainstream media.
Should the U.S. have stricter gun laws? What types of guns are reasonable for citizens to own? Is America’s constitutional freedom to bear arms antiquated and inherently dangerous? Many Americans ask these questions but clear answers remain elusive or at least hotly debated.
The Second Amendment reads: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
These two sentences have long been interpreted differently on all sides of the political spectrum, and there are many ways to look at the issue of gun ownership.
Gun rights advocates argue that allowing citizens to privately own guns makes people safer because they’re able to defend themselves, especially in crime-ridden neighborhoods, according to a CNN article titled, “Do guns make us safer?”
Oppositely, gun control advocates argue that having guns available to society contributes to more crime, not less.
Two pro-gun survivors from the Las Vegas attack, Caren Mansholt and Rusty Dees, reflected on the tragedy.
“I do believe there is a time and a place for gun ownership. I believe that we have the right to protect ourselves as needed,” Masholt told BBC Radio 4’s Today Program.
Dees commented on the shooting as the “tragic cost of freedom.”
“If you can find a gun law that would prevent this from happening, I could sign up today, but I am proud of our country’s Second Amendment rights and I’m glad we are allowed to defend ourselves,” Dees told BBC Radio 4’s Today Program.
Gun ownership advocates point to numerous countries’ statistics to bolster the argument that restrictive laws see an increase in violent crime.
For instance, the United States Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security (OSAC) reported 81 percent of all murders in Jamaica involved firearms in 2016. The island has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world.
Jamaica’s government, in contrast to the U.S., regulates gun and ammunition ownership by charging an annual fee of $12,000 (JM), which most Jamaicans cannot afford.
This year, over 1,000 people have been killed in Jamaica; the country has a total population of 2.8 million.
In Guyana, where the crime rate is above the U.S. national average, owning a gun is also restricted by the government.
OSAC reported that, “Criminals [in Guyana] regularly use weapons, despite a rigorous licensing requirement for the average person to own firearms. Handguns, knives, machetes and cutlasses tend to be the weapons of choice. Criminals may act brazenly, and police officers have been both victims and perpetrators of assaults and shootings.”
Numerous countries face similar consequences when citizens are stripped of their freedom to bear arms. Trinidad & Tobago, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela and others in both Central America and the Caribbean have above average crime rates due to gun violence.
“The gangs and drug traffickers fight amongst themselves to get more territory, and they fight the police,” Ali Mokdad, professor of global health and epidemiology at Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), said of gun violence in Central America and the Caribbean.
On the contrary, the U.S., in comparison to other developed nations such as Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Iceland, Andorra, Canada and Finland, has substantially higher death rates due to gun violence, according to IHME.
Wealthier Asian countries such as Singapore and Japan have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths, with the United Kingdom and Germany as close runner-ups.
“It is a little surprising that a country like ours should have this level of gun violence,” Mokdad said. “If you compare us to other well-off countries, we really stand out.”
In 2016, IHME found that the U.S. had 3.85 deaths due to gun violence per 100,000 people, ranking the country 31st in the world for gun-related deaths.
The Center for Gun Policy and Research and the Violence Prevention Research Program recently conducted a study in Colorado, Washington state and Delaware to find out if stricter state laws requiring more background checks actually resulted in more checks taking place in accordance with the laws.
The research revealed there was little impact. The only state that actually had more checks conducted was Delaware, with an increase from 22 percent to 34 percent depending on the firearm.
The study suggested this could be for numerous reasons, including weak enforcement and citizens not abiding by the law.
“These aren’t the results I hoped to see. I hoped to see an effect. But it’s much more important to see what’s actually happened,” Garen Wintemute, one of the study’s researchers told The Guardian.
The study doesn’t conclude a definitive answer to what actually happened, but the report points to “non-compliance” that “may explain the lack of an overall increase in background checks in Washington and Colorado.”
Examining the way Americans have debated the Second Amendment over the years can give insight into whether or not there will eventually be stricter gun laws. For now, the U.S. will continue to be divided on this particular freedom, especially when mass shootings occur.