gun violence does not only apply to mass shootings.

By Jacquelyn Burrer

I know the title is a bit bold, but if you’re pissed or curious, keep reading.

I recently started reading a book called Enough by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly. This book is about their personal experiences with gun violence from the perspective of gun-owners. Gabrielle was a senator who was shot in the face at an event she was speaking at, and she miraculously survived. The couple started becoming active advocates for gun control, and this book was basically about their journey, and everything they discovered.

In the book, it talks about how they started an organization, Americans for Responsible Solutions, after a mass shooting that they were affected by. Their group gained lots of traction after Gabrielle was shot, and they used this new popularity to fight for solutions. This book is very interesting because they often state multiple times that they are gun-owners who believe strongly in the 2nd Amendment, but they believe that it’s getting out of control.

Before I get completely into this, I wanted to state my personal opinion on gun control. I see it the same way that I look at abortion. I would rather have a gun and not use it than need it & have it taken away. I would rather have the option of getting an abortion and not use it than have the option prohibited. I also believe that action needs to be taken in this subject specifically with universal background checks, and a couple other initiatives I will mention later in the article. These laws will not prevent all tragedies, but if they can prevent even one, that’s a win.

Gun control is a very weird subject because the only time it’s talked about is in a mass shooting situation. Yes, mass shootings are terrible, and we should be trying to prevent them, but in reality, mass shooting deaths are extremely small in comparison to gun deaths. A report from 2013 identified 78 “public mass shootings” between 1983 and 2012, which claimed 547 lives. For context, 11,622 people (more than 20 times the mass shooting toll over three decades) died in gun homicides in 2012 alone. That’s ridiculous. Organizations like March for Our Lives are great because they’re getting their opinions out in the world, but they need to be focusing on the larger issues at hand: domestic violence, suicide, gang violence, and gun trafficking.

The first main issue I mentioned, domestic violence, is a serious threat that can be easily stopped. Many gun-control advocates want to enact laws that restrict people who have been convicted of domestic violence from gaining access to guns. Here’s a couple crazy facts for you if you don’t think this is an issue:

• Nearly one million women alive today have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner.
• In an average month, 52 American women are shot to death by an intimate partner.
• Access to a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it 5 times more likely that a woman will be killed.

If we could get a ban on people who have been convicted of domestic violence from buying guns, we could prevent so much harm, and hopefully save lives.

The next issue is suicide. This is definitely not a common gun-control topic, but it’s actually the leading cause of gun deaths in America. In an average year, 22,274 out of 36,383 gun deaths were caused by suicide. That means nearly two thirds of gun deaths are suicides. Suicide is a much harder issue to tackle because in order to do that, there would be massive reconstruction on the entire process of getting a gun which, in my opinion, is something that is necessary to prevent deaths. We would need to enact processes along the lines of universal background checks & mental health evaluations, but in actuality, any kind of structure would be better than the system we have now.

Gang violence. Many people talk about this issue, but they normally talk about it without thinking about the reality. Take Chicago for example. Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, but they have a very high gun death rate. Why is that? The best conclusion is obviously gun laws don’t work, right? No. That is very, very wrong. What people don’t look at are the locations of which the guns that are used in Chicago come from.

SO FAR THIS YEAR, 1,043 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SHOT TO DEATH IN CHICAGO.

A study of guns in Chicago found that more than 60% of new guns used in Chicago gang-related crimes and 31.6% used in non-gang-related crimes were bought in other states. Indiana was a particularly heavy supplier, providing nearly one-third of the gang guns and nearly one-fifth of the non-gang guns. STATE LINES DO NOT STOP GUN LAWS. The gun laws in the surrounding states are very relaxed which allows them to easily slip guns into cities like Chicago. After new ATF data was released, it was discovered that around 8,700 firearms recovered in Illinois and for which the bureau found a source state, more than half came from out of state — 1,366, nearly 16%, came from Indiana alone.

In the book I was reading, it talked about gun trafficking a lot. I’m going to insert an excerpt that I think describes this issue perfectly.

“Gun trafficking was another major problem that Gabby and I wanted to prioritize. Let’s say you want to make some extra cash selling guns. You have no criminal record and pass a background check at a licensed firearms dealer. You buy ten inexpensive handguns for about $200 each. You load them into your trunk, drive to a street corner late at night, and sell the pistols for $400 each to a customer base that may consist of criminals, but you don’t have direct knowledge of their activities one way or the other. With your markup, you make $2,000. As you drive off, you toss an empty paper cup from your window. ‘What crime was committed here?’ a report asks. Answer: ‘Littering.’ That’s right: there are no federal laws that make those gun transactions illegal. If we applied the same lax standards to drug dealing, a person caught holding dozens of small baggies of cocaine on a street corner late at night would only be charged with possession, not the far more serious charge of intent to distribute.”

Gun trafficking is an issue that is NEVER talked about, and if we could get our country to focus on it even for a little bit, we could help change opinions of gun control, and save lives.

I’m going to close out this insanely long article with my favorite quote from the book that describes my stance on gun control completely, thank you for reading this.

“We don’t fundamentally disagree with the NRA’s constantly repeated line, ‘GUNS DON”T KILL PEOPLE. PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE.’ But our country is in a state of crisis, especially compared to other developed nations, precisely because we have few measures in place to keep guns out of the hands of people who do kill.”