Automatic weapons should be banned. Even if the framers of the Second Amendment intended for it to extend to individual liberties, they probably could not have imagined the destructive capabilities of the high-powered rifle James Eagan Holmes used to fire into a crowded Aurora, Colo. movie theater. Even former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (not to be confused with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who is an adamant supporter of Second Amendment rights) would agree. In 2004, after signing a Massachusetts bill into law, he noted firearms are “instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.”
There are other common sense measures that should be adopted as well. Many states with sensible gun laws – Massachusetts included – require waiting periods to purchase weapons. The idea behind waiting periods is that a potential criminal cannot buy and use a weapon in the same day, therefore giving whatever heated emotions may have led him or her to conspire to commit a crime time to possibly cool. Admittedly this probably wouldn’t have stopped Holmes, who authorities say meticulously plotted out his rampage for months, but it could help curb the thousands (to be exact, 12,179 in the average year, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence) of under-the-radar murders at the hands of a gun-wielding killer.
After September 11 the United States crossed over to the dark side, to fight terrorism. While most of the observation tactics used in the US may seem a bit Orwellian to a free society like America’s, many high-profile terrorist plots – including a sophisticated plot to bomb the New York subway system in 2009 and a recent plot by Northeastern alumnus Rezwan Ferdaus to bomb the Capitol Building and the Pentagon explosive-equipped model airplanes – have been thwarted in their infancy. If these tactics are going to be used in the name of security, they should be used in a non-discriminatory way to protect Americans from all forms of violent danger.
Observation tactics don’t even have to be invasive. If licensed gun dealers were required to report all sales, law enforcement officials would still be able to observe concerning trends. For this to work, of course, sales online and at gun shows – where gun sales are currently not subjected to usual regulations – must be outlawed as well.
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the debate on gun control has made no progress in the weeks since the Aurora shooting. As has been the case in the past, gun-rights advocates see any attempt to place controls on gun ownership – even ones like waiting periods that would have no substantial negative impact on law-abiding citizens – as an attempt to severely restrict their personal freedoms. It also helps that they have one of the nation’s most powerful lobbying groups – the National Rifle Association – behind them.
This is not an issue Northeastern students should ignore. Apart from repeated, high-profile shootings on college campuses, gun violence in the neighborhoods surround Northeastern is also a problem. Students don’t have to look further than the tragic 2008 slaying of Rebecca Payne, or last April’s murder of BU grad student Kanagala Seshadri Rao, to know they aren’t immune from it.
While this problem is too complex to thoroughly solve here , the answer certaintly is not more guns. According to a famous study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gun owners are 43 times more likely to injure themselves or a family member than stop an intruder in their house. Furthermore, a University of Pennsylvania study found victims of crime who were carrying a weapon are 4.5 times as likely to be shot than their unarmed counterparts. Even without these numbers in mind, the often-cited notion that an armed movie goer would have been able to stop Holmes in a dark and smoky theater is unfathomable, if anything it would have added to the chaos and possibly resulted in more victims.
The constant struggle between individual liberties and safety is a reoccurring theme in a democracy. Instead of demanding it be one way or the other while innocent lives are lost, it’s time the leaders of this country take charge and find a real solution, even if it’s tough for some voters to swallow.
