The causes for the plague of gun-related murders gripping our nation is multifaceted and complicated, but not necessarily for the reasons articulated on the right. When they mention causes and solutions, they virtually never bring up the words “guns” or “firearms regulations” other than to discount and reject the cause-and-effect relationship.
The primary distinction separating the United States from other wealthier, highly industrialized countries that boast extremely low rates of gun deaths and injuries (and murders overall by any means) is our nation’s disastrous position on guns and the laws meant to regulate them.
If that is not the case, does that mean the United States has many more cases of mental illness, diagnosed and not? Are schools in the United States significantly “softer targets” than schools, for example, in Australia, Japan, or Sweden? Do boys and young men come from “fatherless” homes at radically higher rates than in these other countries? And why are we not seeing similar violence-prone behaviors in girls and young women from motherless (or fatherless) homes? Additionally, why don’t people on the right talk more often about what effects the fathers who remain in the home, but who inflict abuse on family members, have on the behaviors of these members?
As with all large-scale social problems, we miss the key causes and solutions when we focus solely on individualized cases instead of viewing the essential systemic issues. The major underlying cause by far for the U.S. having the highest rates of firearms deaths and injuries in Western “democracies” is the unprecedented number of these weapons, their easy accessibility, and the lack of political courage by our elected offices to take decisive action by placing common-sense safety regulations on the sale, use, capacity, velocity, and amount of guns in private ownership.
Contrary to Wayne LaPierre’s claim that “to stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun,” I say, “to stop a bad legislator with the NRA, it takes a good voter with a ballot!”
Why do politicians and so many U.S. residents continue to deny, deflect, diffuse, dispose, and dispense with raising issues revolving around the massive and virtually unrestricted availability of firearms, some reaching military-grade capability, as the prime reason for the epidemic of gun violence in the United States?
— Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld in Gun Rights Advocates Mute the Actual Causes of Gun Violence: Hypermasculinity & Easy Access
