But guns certainly make it easier.

Like most people living Asia, I woke up to the morning news and the first RSS feed I read was on the Virginia Tech shooting, the worst of its kind in American history. I think it’s about time some people get it through their thick skulls that private ownership of guns is a stupid thing. I am disturbed that any emotionally unstable teen can pick up a gun from his father’s locker and kill. I am disgusted that Republican politicians like Mitt Romney have to suck up to the NRA to please the conservative voters. I think the Second Amendment is a good idea badly conveyed and horribly misinterpreted.

Read on for why.

The founding fathers assumed that power corrupts and a government always requires checks and balances to remain true to the people’s interest. For that purpose, the people must have the ability to rise against an oppressive government should the need arise and thus the need for private ownership of guns. This might have been effective two hundred years ago when everyone used wooden musket guns and it didn’t take a lot of effort to burn down the White House, but today it is absurd to think that any private militia can have the firepower to match the US military’s cutting-edge technology and astronomical budget. Does anyone seriously believe that keeping a pistol by your bedside will help you if someone decided to turn America into a theocratic dictatorship? Unless you are Laura Bush, the answer is definitely “no”.

And that is exactly why no other functional democracies in the world relies on private gun ownership as a safeguard against a corrupted government. Instead they rely on dividing the power among different branches of the government and on an educated and well-informed population. If the day comes when it becomes necessary for the people to overthrow the government by force, then democracy has already failed. Are advocates of gun ownership saying that democracy in America is so screwed up and unreliable that such an arrangement is really called for, in spite of the innumerable negative effects it has on society? What a huge insult to the system that is the pride of so many Americans.

Not only does private gun ownership contribute absolutely nothing to in today’s democracies, it brings about a boatload of otherwise avoidable social problems. Some people feel unsafe without a gun for self defence because they would otherwise stand no chance against an armed criminal. But the irony is that the criminal is armed only because he too is allowed to possess firearms under the same set of laws. These gun right advocates claim that if gun control laws are passed, then honest citizens will be robbed of their right to self defence while the criminals continue to arm themselves with black market guns. But they are wrong. With proper law enforcement, criminals will have access to less guns than before and ultimately the number of gun-related violent crimes will drop. It is selfish for people to keep guns to protect themselves at the expense of public safety because it creates a harmful environment where guns are more easily obtainable.

Also, it is important to note that carrying a gun does not necessarily mean you are safer. If an armed man robs me, I will give up my valuables and stand a good chance of walking away from the encounter alive, because the goal of the robber is money and generally it is wiser to avoid killing and causing unnecessary trouble. On the other hand, if I respond by pulling out a gun, the situation changes and one of two things happen: I shoot him or he shoots me. Either way, someone will die.

Guns make killing all to easy. You can be walking home from work and end up getting shot by a drunk and bored teenager, or attending lessons when your classmate who just got dumped by his girlfriend pulls out a gun and shoot you. The people committing these murders are not members of organized criminal syndicates, they are emotionally unstable stupid teenagers who have an all-too-easy access to legally-purchased guns. Maybe mafia mobsters will continue to have access to black market guns even after gun control laws are passed, but at least these idiots will not. If the laws are enforced by a competent police force, and yet a criminal manages to obtain a gun illegally without getting caught, then clearly he possesses a higher level of intelligence and self discipline than the Columbine shooters.

And without guns, what will crazy nut jobs do in the spur of the moment when caught in a heated argument that they just can’t win with words alone? The worst they can do is to stab the other party with a knife. If they can even figure out how. Maybe they will succeed killing one person, but you can bet that it will not be 32 people. In a society that allows private gun ownership, the sanctity of life is cheapened to a trigger squeeze.

Knives, baseball bats, metal rods, golf clubs, lengths of rope, glass shards, rocks and, yes, even guns can kill people. The difference is that guns do it too well to be allowed in the hands of the untrained and undisciplined masses. Police officers and soldiers are duty bound and professionally responsible for their actions, it’s what they are trained to do. The average emo teenager on LJ is neither. I’m not saying that it is impossible for a trained soldier to loss his cool and commit murder, but I think it’s obvious which one is more likely to cause the next record-breaking campus shooting.

…But I guess freedom and liberty and whatnot is more important than going to school without having to pass through metal detectors. Whenever will some people learn to see what is true freedom?