In the debate over gun control, one of the ideas I keep seeing come up is that in homicide situations, the weapon is often a moot point.
If a person was intent on killing another person but didn’t have a gun, he or she would just use another weapon, like a knife, instead. The idea of trying to keep guns out of the hands of certain people is a useless tactic in trying to cut down the murder rate, because the person would simply turn to other means.
Leaving the rest of the gun control debate, I’m here to make the argument that a person having easy access to a gun makes all the difference. But to do this, I am going to make a parallel case to another situation: suicide. Stay with me here. I’ll explain.
Now, admittedly, the acts of homicide and suicide have little to do with one another, except we could all probably agree we wish neither of those groups had been in a situation necessary to commit either.
When civic groups lobby a city to put a suicide barrier on its bridges, opponents of the plan say the barrier is a moot point. They say that instead of jumping off a bridge, suicidal people will just find other ways to end their life. They argue that although the barrier may prevent suicides off that particular bridge, the overall suicide rate won’t go down.
It’s a good thought, but studies and situations have proved it wrong.
One of the most dramatic examples is the British coal gas story.
Before the 1970s in Britain, ovens were powered by coal-derived gas that produced a lot of deadly carbon monoxide if there was an open valve. To stick your head in the oven and run the gas became the most common method of suicide (remember Sylvia Plath?), with numbers upward of 2,500 deaths a year.
But in the 1970s, the British government changed out coal gas with natural gas, and a funny thing happened. Suicide rates plummeted by a third and have stayed around that level since.
This was all because an easy means to death was taken away. People couldn’t end their lives impulsively without second thoughts. If they still meant to go through with it, they would have to find a harder way, and judging by the numbers, it’s clear that most never bothered to.
By removing a means to an end, Britain effectively reduced the end result, and this process has been aptly titled “means reduction.”
Taking means reduction back to accessibility to guns, I need to make a couple of things clear.
Gun control will never prevent homicides by people extremely determined to commit them. But in cases of spontaneous impulse and anger, not having an extremely straightforward, extremely lethal tool in a person’s hand could save lives in the end. We have to look at this “intent creates the weapon” logic backward.
What if having guaranteed access to a weapon gives more determination to the intent?
It could be argued that New York adopted a means reduction strategy by passing some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation.
This year, New York’s police commissioner said, “We’re taking 8,000 weapons annually out of the hands of people we stop, 800 of them illegal handguns. We’re preventing crimes before someone is killed and before someone else has to go to prison for murder or other serious crimes.”
Controversial?
Ridiculously so, but it didn’t stop New York from having the lowest reported number of murders this year since 1963.
Whether you agree or disagree, I hope these thoughts give you a new perspective when someone says murder is inevitable regardless of the weapon.
Lauren Flannery is a business administration sophomore at UF. Her column runs on Tuesdays. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
