Anna Fleming
It has been said that the politics of gun control are impossible to reconcile. I believe that we can get to the heart of the issue by asking the following question: What is of value to us? To get to the bottom of this, we must recognize that there are three components involved in this debate: a very specific set of rights, the lives of those in the path of firearms and the guns themselves. I don’t believe it is too reductive to treat them as the main elements of this equation. It is my argument that, in order to honor and preserve the second of the three components, we must abolish our focus on that set of specific rights and focus instead on the guns themselves.
After the Sandy Hook Massacre, it was revealed in investigations that the shootings of 20 first graders, four teachers, a principal and the school’s psychologist were carried out to completion in a breathtaking five-minute timespan. That five-minute period contained the discharge of 152 bullets. When the Assault Weapons Ban was in effect, restrictions were in place so that a citizen could only purchase ten round magazines. Sandy Hook, the killer, would have had to reload fourteen times, allowing the escape of many more children.
Instead, 152 bullets were fired in the span of five minutes. The accumulation of experiences that died along with the people who would have lived them is staggering. This is from where my core argument stems: with each gun rights activist that bases his or her argument on the belief that we are robbing gun owners of a recreational experience, an actual experience of a child, such as the ones at Sandy Hook Elementary, is taken away.
This is why it is imperative that even if the debate cannot be completely resolved, there must be concrete action taken to renew the Assault Weapons Ban passed under the Clinton Administration in 1994. The passage would support the notion that we value life, which unequivocally trumps the Second Amendment. This progress would be coupled with the fact that gun control has existed in legislation (for a period of ten years, no less, until it was revoked under the Bush Administration) without the complete abolition of the Constitution, dissipating the common argument that the right of citizen would be degraded if action were taken in a regulatory direction.
Time is a blessing when it allows children to escape from a classroom with a shooter in it. Yet time, when spent unwisely in legislative deliberations, can also be lethal. There is too much value placed in a right that has allowed for the massacres of elementary school children to proceed. There is too much value placed in a slippery-slope fantastical vision of a future in which a Police State reigns. There is not enough value placed in the efficient passage of a law that would preserve lives. As Dianne Feinstein stated in a 2013 CNN interview, “You reach a point where enough is enough.”