Last week, the Washington Navy Yard incident was the latest mass shooting to plague our country. Other shootings on this list include Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Aurora movie theater massacre.
A few places that do not appear on this list include Pearl High School, San Antonio Theater and Parker Middle School. If you’re not familiar with these names, they all were shootings that would have been much worse if not for a law-abiding citizen with a gun.
Before I continue, let me make something perfectly clear: I am neither advocating for everyone to have a gun on their waist, nor am I advocating for everyone to have the ability to purchase a firearm without a background check.
What I am trying to say is that a good guy with a gun actually checked a potential shooting. And afterward, there was not a discussion about more gun control measures, which typically don’t work due to their arbitrary nature and general bureaucratic ineffectiveness. It is also important to make perfectly clear in our gun-control debate that all gun-control measures are not created equally. For example, ensuring those who are on the terrorist watch list are not permitted to purchase weapons — something that currently is not in place — is a sound and practical measure.
However, an arbitrary 15-round limit on ammunition magazines, which is in effect in Colorado, does not seem to be as credible an effort. Unfortunately, most of the proposed legislation that results after shootings is like the last example.
A Harvard study concluded that “nations with stringent gun controls tend to have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns.” Gun control predominantly only affects legal gun owners. Criminals — lawbreakers in nature — would not acquiesce to newly written gun laws.
In the background of our national dialogue, gun violence is actually decreasing even though states are reducing their gun laws.
After the Newtown massacre, the Obama administration sent Vice President Joe Biden to head the task force on gun violence.
In his new role, Biden attended a meeting of the National Rifle Association and other gun-owning groups. A representative of the NRA later relayed something the vice president said to him during that meeting: “We simply don’t have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody” who breaks a gun law. And yet, Biden’s task force ultimately concluded that the country needs, in fact, more gun laws.
Our huge national bureaucracy enforces our gun legislation. It recently failed us when it let the Navy Yard shooter slip through the cracks. Aaron Alexis was honorably discharged from the Navy, despite numerous disciplinary problems.
Before the shooting, Alexis shot someone’s tires and ceiling, and claimed that a microwave made him unable to speak. Though the police told the Navy about some of these incidents, they were not entered into the system.
“The Navy decided it was too hard to give him a general discharge ... just because the bureaucracy couldn’t function,” Newt Gingrich said on CNN show “Crossfire.”
A knee-jerk response to these shootings is to create gun-free zones. However, economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a study that found that mass shootings most often occur in places where guns are banned and where people are generally unarmed — schools and shopping centers, for example.
The other tragedy is the fact that the federal government fails to come up with a solution to the declining state of our mental health system. It seems the only time we bring this up is after a mass shooting.
We must invest our time and effort into trying to repair the national mental health system. Doing so on its own merits is worth it, even if another shooting is not involved. This investment would arguably prevent future tragic events from occurring.
In order for us to ensure a safer tomorrow, we need to make sure we know where our priorities lie.
We should realize that more gun control does not correlate to a safer society and that fixing the mental health system would make an immediate and positive difference.
Michael Beato is a UF economics sophomore. His column runs on Tuesdays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 9/24/2013 under the headline "America misses mark when it comes to guns"
