The Second
Amendment is currently under some of the most concentrated scrutiny it has ever
received since our founding fathers wrote it.
The right to bear arms is without doubt one of the most widely
interpreted and debated writings of our Constitution. Now, in the wake of several more American
tragedies including the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the Aurora,
Colorado theater shooting, people are looking for someone to blame – and who
could be a better target than the folks in Hollywood who create more and more
films as the years go by that are loaded with gun violence. In a recent interview, Connecticut Senator
Joe Lieberman openly blames the entertainment industry for the recent tragedies:
"The violence in the entertainment culture –
particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et
cetera – does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent. It doesn’t make everybody more violent, but
it’s a causative factor in some cases."
-Sen. Lieberman
The simple
fact of the matter is, and I am not the first to say it, that movies don’t
cause violence, video games don’t cause violence, even guns don’t cause
violence. PEOPLE CAUSE VIOLENCE.
Now, use me
as an example: I grew up watching violent movies, playing violent video games,
and now I even make violent movies of
my own sometimes. But I promise you if
you stuck me in an elementary schoolyard during recess with a loaded AK-47, I
would not shoot anyone. That’s because
I’m not mentally ill and I was taught how to properly handle a gun when I was
young. At my grandfather’s house to this
day the rifle is on the wall, the shotgun is in the corner and the ammunition
is in the kitchen drawer, yet nobody in the family has gone on a killing
spree. The problem isn’t in the movies
or video games, it’s in the education of how to be a good human – aka
parenting.
The worst
part about the whole problem is that now the government feels like they have to
take some sort of action to appease the people. Their solution is to make more
laws prohibiting more guns, but this was tried in the past with the 1994 Ban on
Assault Weapons, with relatively no success.
The only people that laws affect are
law-abiding citizens! That means the
government is taking the guns out of the hands of the people who use them correctly
and leaving them in the hands of the criminals.
Laws don’t stop criminals from doing what they want to do. Cocaine is
illegal, heroine is illegal, marijuana is illegal (kinda), but if right now I
had some insatiable urge to go shoot some heroine I can promise you I wouldn’t
have too much of a problem finding some… Oh, but it’s illegal. So is breaking
every other law, from speeding to murder, yet people who want to do those
things do them regardless of the fact that that the government writes down that
they are not supposed to. No matter how
illegal you make guns, people who want to shoot other people will still get
them.
This does
not mean I encourage a no rules free-for-all when it comes to buying guns. There should be more in-depth background
checks, longer cooling-off periods, and things like that to make it harder for
people who may end up crazy to get their hands on a deadly weapon. But strictly banning types of guns that some
government official deems more dangerous than the next just won’t do it.
-Wallace West, 10 Feb. 2013
