It is truly troubling that people feel the urge to shoot people in schools. I can’t wrap my head around the initial terror and resulting grief for those directly or indirectly involved. It’s just unimagineable. And each time one of these horrific events occurs, policymakers talk about the inevitable – gun control and mental health. I hear pleas for “common sense” laws to help combat the problem of school shootings. I am not opposed to this notion – stronger background checks, mandatory sentences for people who commit crimes with guns, et. al. To be sure, guns and mental health issues are part of the problem. I am just not sure how much of the problem. First of all, there are a couple of things that are inarguably true with regard to guns and violence in America. • There are far more guns in America today than at any time in history, and gun ownership by citizens is at an all-time high per capita. • Murder and other violent crime continues to fall. A report published last week by the FBI, “Crime in the United States, 2014.” found there were 3.9 percent fewer gun murders in 2014 as compared to 2013 and was the lowest rate of any year included in the report back to 2010. The vast majority of gun murders were committed with handguns, but all categories of gun murders declined. Rifles were involved in 248 murders last year, fewer than the number committed with knives, blunt objects and fists or feet. Three percent of gun murders involved rifles. The overall murder rate declined by 1.2 percent year over year. The downward trend extended to other crimes, too. The overall violent crime rate was down 1 percent between 2013 and 2014. The rate of robbery and aggravated assault fell. The overall property crime rate decreased 5 percent in the same time period. The rates of burglary, larceny theft and motor vehicle theft all declined. The report notes, “The decrease in most crimes during 2014 is a continuation of a decades-long trend in the United States. Both violent crime and property crime are down over 20 percent compared with 2005. Every category of violent and property crime has fallen in that period. The rate of rapes has decreased by 10.9 percent.” This evidence flies in the face of the “more guns equals more crime” logic of gun-control proponents. The truth is, amid a culture with far more guns, far more ammunition and a weak economy, there is far less crime. These inconvenient truths also fly in the face of the national media’s crime reporting which has a majority of Americans believing crime is significantly on the rise. I perceive school shootings – the most heinous of gun crimes – in a class by themselves. The tough question is, what kind of laws will help reduce them? The short answer is none. I believe the aforementioned drop in violent crime has occurred largely because of more robust law enforcement. Technology has cops much better equipped to solve crimes and people are less likely to commit crimes when they believe they will get caught. Let’s be honest. Nobody gets away with robbing liquor stores anymore. The problem is, enforcement doesn’t really line up very well with preventing school shootings because the shooters have no fear of getting caught. They want to get caught, and in most cases, they want to die, either by their own hand or in a shootout with police. And since most school shooters never had run-ins with the law before, most could pass any type of required background check and freely purchase a weapon. But are the number of guns and lax gun laws really the problem anyway? American has more guns per capita than any other country – at least 89 guns per 100 people, according to research by Georgia Southern University professor Laura Agnich. (I think that’s a low number. It’s probably closer to 100 per 100.) She studied a 20-year period from 1993 to 2013 in which there were 55 school shootings in America. (For purposes of the study, “school shooting” was defined as at least one casualty and more than one intended.) Some countries with a high numbers of guns per capita, like Austria (30 per 100) have much stricter gun controls than the U.S. Austria had only one school shooting during the study period. But then there’s a place like Yemen with 55 guns per 100 and virtually no gun control, including no ban on assault weapons, that also had only one school shooting. Switzerland has 46 guns per 100 people, Finland 45, and Serbia 38. These countries had no shool shootings in the period studied. Of the top 10 countries with the most guns per capita, seven had no school shootings. So it seems that gun laws and high levels of gun ownership are not the determining factors in how many school shootings there are going to be. Only a miniscule percentage of law-abiding gun owners are involved in gun crimes. Know why? It’s because they’re law-abiding. Heck, given the sheer number of guns and gun owners in the U.S., if law-abiding gun owners were as unhinged and violent as anti-gunners like to portray them, there would be no anti-gunners. To be sure, one could argue that anybody who shoots up a classroom is mentally ill. But only a tiny percentage – less than a half of 1 percent – of school shooters were ever diagnosed as suffering from depression, anxiety or some other form of mental illness. So even if a law was passed that said anyone with a “mental illness” can’t buy a gun, it would do little in the way of preventing school shootings. Long story short, I don’t think the problem in America is guns. I think the problem is a decades-long fomenting of the cultures of violence, class warfare, secularism and marginalization. We’ve taught generations that traditional values are a joke, the family is passe, religion is a fairy tale, violence is the best way to resolve conflict and there is no power higher than the government. So let’s just be honest about this, can we? When people like President Obama talk about “common sense gun laws keeping guns out of the hands of bad people,” it sounds great. Sure. Let’s do it. Pass those laws. Problem is, it’s an exercise in futility. An America where bad people can never obtain a gun is not an option on the table. It would be great if it was, but it’s not. And it never will be. There are at least 300 million guns in America. Even if the government trampled the Second Amendment and banned guns tomorrow – which it would never do – confiscation efforts would fall woefully short. There still would be literally tens if not hundreds of millions of guns in circulation and they’re designed to last for a hundred years. If there was a law that could prevent school shootings, it would have been passed a long time ago. School shootings simply are not a problem we can legislate away. School shootings are a problem of hearts and minds.
