A Chink in the Armor : 
Killers and the Hard Heart That Beats Within

The one-year anniversary of the tragic shootings at Columbine high is soon to be upon us, and President Clinton is still working on restricting the rights of law-abiding gun owners. In light of Columbine and other related shootings since, it’s time to take yet another look at gun control, and why it just doesn’t work.

About two weeks ago, my friend Ryan and I went to a gunshow. Of course, as per federal and state law, we were met with several restrictions. If I wanted to buy a rifle, the dealers are required to run an FBI background check. If I wanted to buy a pistol, and I did, I would’ve needed a purchasing permit. So the myth that people buy all sorts of guns illegally at gunshows is wrong. I, James Yeh, a law-abiding citizen, was interested buying a six round .25 caliber pistol one might describe as a Saturday Night Special. (It was a good price, fifty bucks.) I asked the dealer about it and if I’d be able to buy one, and he said I would need a permit that I could get from the police. Not having one, I didn’t buy one. There, a legal sale of a firearm has been averted. But how many of those same fifty dollar .25 caliber pistols make it onto the streets illegally? Aren’t I, as a law-abiding citizen, at a distinct disadvantage for not being able to buy it to protect myself from criminals who have no such limits? These gun control laws are basically penalizing me for obeying the law, and that penalty is having to rely on other, perhaps less effective ways of defending myself. Sure, I could go into Detroit and get myself the same gun out of the trunk of some dealer’s car, but I chose to obey the law. And for doing so, I now must rely on mace, icepicks, or e-tools to defend myself with. Lucky for me, I’m big enough to be able to do some significant damage to a person with an icepick. But what about women or men that aren’t as large as me? They’re just screwed, aren’t they? Screwed over by the very government that seeks to protect them.

Just few weeks ago, Smith and Wesson, the gunmakers behind the famous Model 29 .44 Magnum, agreed to incorporate new trigger locks and other such devices into their products in exchange for the government to drop them from gun-violence liability lawsuits. Massachusetts recently introduced anti-gun legislation that included forcing gun manufacturers to label guns as dangerous objects. (Frankly, anyone who doesn’t know that a gun a dangerous has no place buying guns period, unless it’s to put a bullet through his or her own head to remove him or herself from the gene pool.) With all these gun laws in place, however, the only people affected will not be the violent criminals that indeed shouldn’t have guns; rather it is the law-abiding gun owner that will be affected.

For example, say someone wants to go rob a bank, carjack a car, or any other illegal activity. Is he or she really going to worry about breaking a law on the way to breaking another law? Are criminals really going to put trigger locks on a gun that they’re not suppose to have in the first place? “Oh gee, I better put a trigger lock on my illegally purchased gun. I wouldn’t want to break the law, now would I?” But trigger locks inhibit the use of guns used for self defense. If a criminal were using a gun to carjack people, he or she would have it ready, right? So wouldn’t it make sense for someone to have his or her gun in an easily accessible place, without a gunlock?

Proponents of trigger locks say it would prevent any accidental deaths by children playing with guns. Well, another way to prevent accidental deaths by kids playing with guns would be to simply for parents to tell their kids not to play with guns. Sure, people will say that it’s not as simple as that, but it is. If a kid is plays with guns even after his or her parents explicitly tell him or her not too, then that’s the parent’s own damn fault for having letting their parental authority deteriorate. And even if somehow it was the gun’s fault, and that parent’s child or one of his or her playmates were accidentally wounded or killed with his or her own gun, it’s that parent’s own fault for buying something that was “dangerous.”

So what makes lawmakers believe that by limiting access to guns that shootings will go down? They seem to think that it’s the gun itself that does the killing, as if it’s possessed by some sort of demon, when in fact, it’s the finger on the trigger, which is attached to a hand, which is attached to a person. In Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant remarked that the gun, rather rifle, is merely a tool and that it is a hard heart that kills. So what makes lawmakers think that taking away the tool will take away the desire to kill?

Seventy or eighty years ago, anyone with $225 could walk into a general store or a sporting goods store and buy themselves a Thompson submachine gun. They were also available through mail order straight from the maker, Auto-Ordnance. Granted, $225 was a lot of money back then, but the Tommy gun was a fine piece of work. If the Tommy gun, which could spit out over a thousand of rounds of .45 caliber ammunition a minute, was available to everyone, then surely a less powerful weapon was available to the masses as well, such as shotguns, rifles and pistols. In fact, guns were available via the mail until 1968. In addition to this relative ease of legally purchasing a weapon, none of them had trigger locks. So with all that in mind, why weren’t people walking into shopping malls and spraying the masses with lead? Why didn’t any kids, with so many killing devices available to them then, go on any killing sprees then?

Today, there are various restrictions on purchasing firearms. It’s harder now to buy a gun than it has ever been before. Today, Bill Gates could mail Auto-Ordnance a blank check for a fully automatic Tommy gun and they still wouldn’t mail him one. A potential buyer would now need a purchasing permit and/or a owner’s permit, available only through the police. Yet people, mostly kids, are going out of their way to purchase these “tools.” Unfortunately, lawmakers are unwilling to blame those hard hearts that kill. And until we target the continued deteriorating of parental authority and those hard hearts that kill, the government will continue to try to disarm the law-abiding public until they are mere subjects rather than true citizens.