Making a case for banning assault weapons is rather moot now since Bush allowed the ban to expire on Monday night (9/13/04), but truth be told the same arguments apply to all guns. Since owning guns is still legal in the US, I will then present my case for banning them. I'm not even going to get into the debate about whether or not the second amendment protects the right to private ownership of firearms. It's an issue still being hotly contested by both sides and is outside of the scope of this article. And, quite frankly, it's irrelevant because having the right to do something doesn't mean that it's wise to exercise that right. (Do you think maybe this article would persuade more people if I changed the title to "A Case for Voluntarily Getting Rid of Guns"?)

No matter how you start a discussion about guns, you're bound to hear the pro-gun mantra: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." There are (at least) two possible meanings to this phrase. The first is that if people who had guns never did anything irresponsible with them, then no one would die from guns. The second intepretation is probably the most popular: that people kill people all the time and a gun is no more dangerous than any other weapon. If guns are banned, people will still die at the hands of other people. I will concede the first point after making two observations of my own. First, even taking all precautions, accidents do still happen. Second, people who have guns will always do irresponsible things with them. Kind of like teaching abstinence as the only form of birth control. It's great on paper, but it fails miserably in real life. It is the second interpretation I intend to counter in this discussion.

There are lots of things that people can use to kill other people. Everyday, ordinary objects. Like letter openers. Or ashtrays. Or even lamps. But when you buy a new letter opener or an ashtray or a lamp for your house, do you warn your kids about how it might kill them if they're not careful? Do you sit them down and teach them safety procedures for handling it? (You might teach them to walk with the point of the letter opener pointing down. But if you already did that for scissors, you may get lucky and not have to do it again for the letter opener.) Do you teach them safety instructions if you bring a gun in the house? In 2000, 898 people died as a result of being unintentionally struck by or against some undetermined object compared to 802 who accidentally died from firearms. So the common everyday things that might strike us or we might fall against are more dangerous than firearms if you go by numbers killed. So why do you do warn about guns and not the others if the others kill more people? What changes the level of danger to make you take that extra precaution? The kids are the same, the house is the same, you're the same. The ONLY thing that's changed is which new item you've brought into the house-- lamp or gun. Therefore, it is the mere presence of the gun that raises the danger level in your house and causes you to warn your children. If it didn't raise the danger level, there would be no need to explain safe handling of a gun anymore than there's a need to explain safe handling of a lamp.

To stay that guns are not dangerous is like saying that cars are not dangerous. Even when used properly both can kill accidentally! Many people will point to statitistics for cigarettes and automobile accidents and say that 20 times more people die from these two than from guns, so why focus so much on guns? My answer: I cannot kill someone with a cigarette from 500 feet away. I cannot kill someone with a cigarette in a fit of rage. I cannot kill someone with a cigarette in a moment of despair. I cannot hide a cigarette in my pocket and whip it out and kill someone with it. I can't kill 9 people in a minute with a cigarette. Someone with a gun could do any of those (although some do require more skill than the rest.)

You cannot compare the danger of guns versus other weapons/items based solely on the number of lives lost. Such a comparison ignores many other factors that make guns far more dangerous than other items or activities that kill far more people. Heart disease is the number one killer for non-accidental deaths and yet anyone who called a donut more dangerous than a gun because it caused heart disease would be a laughing stock.

The presence of a gun intimidates many people into not trying to stop a crime they are either victim of or witness to. A gun damns many a woman to being a survivor of rape. You can't hold a woman at cigarette point and use the fear of that cigarette to rape her. It's one thing to fight off an attacker when he's got a knife-- quite another to take that chance with a gun. Most don't risk it. It's one thing to try to stop a thug from mugging someone if he's using fists. It's quite another if he has his victim at gunpoint. Most people will walk on by if they see a gun. It's not worth the risk to them "just" to help a stranger.

Personal choice is a big part of determining danger too. Most deaths by vehicles are of drivers or passengers in other cars-- and they got in those cars voluntarily, KNOWING the risks. There are some pedestrian or cyclist deaths, but even in those cases, those pedestrians and cyclists are choosing to walk/bike where they know they run the risk of being involved in an accident with a car. For the most part, there's a defined "danger zone" for death by car and that's a narrow ribbon of concrete/asphalt called a road. (Okay, there are parking lots too.) But that leaves the whole rest of the world free of any chance of being hit and killed by a car (barring some freak accident or supernatural event.)

Almost 40% of all gun deaths are homicides. People don't choose to be murdered. The vast majority of the remaining deaths are suicides. Most people who commit suicide truly believe that there is no other way out of their pain. They believe they have no choice but to die. (Whether that is true or not is irrelevant to the one pointing a gun at their own head.) I don't have any choice in the matter of whether or not I want to be exposed to the dangers and risks of guns. Guns don't give you anywhere to be free of the danger of being shot by someone. If I want to avoid or at least drastically lower the risk of being hit by a car, I can live far out in the country and grow my own food and I never have to be near a car in my life. But that's not going to stop me from being shot to death by someone I see out in the country when they're afraid I'll report them to the police. In some cases, isolation only increases your risks. I have a cousin who used to live in the middle of nowhere. It was so quiet and peaceful at their house, surrounded by fields. We used to have our family reunions there so we wouldn't bother the neighbors. A bunch of thugs found his peaceful house and gang raped his wife at gunpoint because they no one could see them out in the boondocks.

A side issue to personal choice is intent. Very few people get into cars with the intent of killing someone else. Very few people shoot someone else with any other intent, even if you are shooting someone who is trying to hurt you. Statistics show that only about 1% of all deaths by guns are "justifiable homicides" (ie, self-defense), so that leaves the rest with the intent to kill, scare or intimidate.

Guns kill even when it's not intended. There was a story years ago that I read in Reader's Digest, I believe, about a man in New York City who was out shooting at targets on the river and one of the bullets skipped off the water, went through the wall of the house on the other side of the river and killed a man sitting on his sofa inside. Police had NO clue who did it or why...until they found the bullet type. Because it was a rare bullet, they eventually tracked down the man who had fired the fatal shot. He didn't intend to kill anyone. But he did. He couldn't have done that with any other weapon. Not even a car.

Then there's the factor of necessity. Cars are, for all intents and purposes, a necessity for most of us. There's not enough places to work within walking/running/biking distance of my house to support the local population. Almost everyone drives to work. We need cars to get people to the hospital, to buy food, for our work itself (ie, in-house appliance repair or carpet cleaner or pizza delivery), to get to school. The police need cars, the fire department, even the army needs cars. Nobody (except MAYBE police and the military and those who subsistence hunt) NEEDS a gun.

There are inherent risks in life. Car accidents are one of them. Dying by gunshot is not. It is an utterly senseless death. And in virtually all cases, it is a violent death. If a suicide, the suicide haunts the family. The parents of a child who kills himself with the gun they owned will forever wonder "What if...." Would their child still be there had they not owned a gun? The parents of children killed in drive by shootings-- something you can't do without a gun-- are victims of a crime, but their families will most likely never get any justice or closure or know who killed their child. Children whose parents are shot to death in front of their eyes have to live with that horrible memory. It's not likely something that they'll have to worry about if their parent dies in a car wreck unless they're in the car when the accident happens.

When my oldest son was in elementary school, another child was looking forward to going hunting for the first time with his father. The week before, his mother had written a letter to the editor of our local paper, complaining about how she had to pay for his art supplies like glue and scissors and paper. That was what she paid taxes for, she wrote in indignation. Opening day of huntint season arrived and he and his father were in the basement, making final preparations. (We live in a rural area-- many people hunt on their own farms or those of friends, so they don't really have to drive to hunt.) The kid had the mandatory hunter education course before he got his license. The father ran upstairs for just a minute to get something-- and that's when he heard the bang. He ran downstairs and found his son dead on the basement floor: he'd dropped the rifle, butt first, onto the ground and it had discharged, blowing off his entire face and the top part of his head. That father will forever be haunted by those last few moments. And for what? A set of horns to mount and some deer steaks! I'd be willing to bet that his mother would pay for twenty years of art supplies just to have him back.

There's also the finality of a gun. By this I mean that once that trigger is pulled, there is no turning back. If I decide to commit suicide by slicing my wrists or by taking pills, I have time to change my mind. I can bind the cuts and throw up the pills before calling 911 for assistance. If I decide to kill you by stabbing you with a knife, in most cases, I'll have to stab you muliple times in order to kill you. I can, at any point, stop. If I try to run you down with my car, I can turn aside at any point before hitting you. But if I aim a gun at you (or myself) and pull that trigger, I can't stop that bullet.

Pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger makes the entire act of killing so much easier. There's no physical strength involved, no struggle, no chance for the victim to turn the tables. You don't even have to hear their pleas for mercy or their screams of terror. It's fast, which makes it much more amenable to impulsive actions, like heat of the moment type crimes (or suicides) that would probably never happen if the "shooter" had to use a knife instead. You stand back out of harms reach and you pull the trigger. It's so very "sterile" that it's almost unreal and quite a lot of people-- especially youngsters-- don't grasp that it is deadly! They see people on TV and in video games get shot and never die. Or come back after they die. The people they see shot on TV don't talk about how painful the wound is after the fact. Or the long hours of physical therapy that many have to go through to recover-- if they can recover. It's not uncommon for gunshot victims to end up in wheelchairs if they survive being shot. A child's grasp on the difference between reality and fantasy isn't as strong as most adults and few children or even young adults are able to grasp the long term effects of what may be a moment of extreme anger.

Also in the "ease" department, is the size, shape, weight, versatility and cost of the gun. I can't stick a car in my pocket and slide a note to the teller demanding all her money. I can't kill you with a car while driving it a quarter mile away from you. I can't kill you with my car if you're on the second floor of a building and I'm on the street. And compared to cars, guns are dirt cheap.

But for me, the most compelling reason for banning assault weapons is that laws don't stop people from doing things they're not supposed to do. They never have! If they did, we'd have no need for jails. Laws give us a way of dealing with people who do what they're not supposed to do. People who buy assault weapons and who aren't avid gun collectors (and I even think there's a way that collectors can already have them) or subsistence hunters aren't buying them because they look pretty. They're buying them to HURT people-- even if it's just the intruder in their home. If it's illegal to HAVE one, then we can arrest them BEFORE they hurt someone instead of waiting until AFTER when the damage has already been done.

While I'd love to live in a world where there were no guns, I also realize it's not a realistic goal at this state in humanity's evolution. But I feel there are many common sense changes to laws we can make that would cut down and/or eliminate many of the problems we have with guns now.

We make all beginning drivers reach a minimum age, take a test and get their eyes checked before we issue them a learner's permit. While they have this permit, they cannot drive unless a licensed adult is in the car with them. Some states make those with learners permits wait a minimum of six months before they can apply for the license. In my state, they must also turn in an affadavit, signed by a licensed driver, that they have completed a minimum of 50 hours behind the wheel. Why don't we do this for those who want to shoot guns as well?

We license drivers of cars. They have to not only take a written test, they have to also demonstrate proficiency at handling an automobile safely. They have to renew their license every 4-6 years and that license is subject to revocation if they violate safety laws. Additionally, in most states nowadays, there are added limitations placed on young drivers. Why don't we do this for those who want to own/shoot guns as well?

We register every vehicle and in addition to its VIN, we issue it a "fingerprint" called a license plate. Most states require vehicle safety inspections. Most also require that the vehicle owner carry insurance in case that vehicle is involved in an accident that includes loss of life or property. We title each vehicle so that it allows us to trace back the ownership should we find that vehicle was involved in some illegal activity. Why don't we do this for guns as well?

I rest my case.

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