Virginia Governor Calls for Background Checks After On Air Shooting

If you even casually glance at the news headlines coming out of the United States, you will see this topic come up again and again.

Yes, over and over, some incident occurs that is uniquely American. There are episodes that you simply do not see with such alarming frequency in other countries.

Why?

Well, that seems to be a source of debate among Americans. But I, for one, think it is actually quite obvious that the reason that it does not happen that often in other places is that they have more sensible gun access legislation.

This time, it was a news reporter on air who was one of the two people shot. Alison Parker and Adam Ward were the ones who were shot. Parker, a reporter, is being operated on now, as I write this, to my understanding. People might have been watching this live, as I understand it.

As of right now, the man responsible is being pursued by the police. Police say they are hot in pursuit, and are about to make an arrest.

The governor of Virginia has responded by saying that he is a gun owner, but that we as a country need to unite together to demand and create background checks on guns.

And here is another thing that I personally have repeated quite a few times before: we need to employ more common sense in regards to the gun debate.

I am personally friends with gun owners who feel strongly about the issue, yet lean towards the other side. And it seems that gun advocates use the same old, tired arguments about how tighter gun control laws are an inevitable step towards dictatorship. They will remind you that Hitler and the Nazis passed laws to essentially disarm the German population, and that this surely contributed to what happened there in the 1930's and 1940's.

Okay, perhaps. But two things that I would argue to count that.

First, many of these same gun advocates express no outrage whatever at actual signs that this country is slipping closer towards a dictatorship, such as increased and excessive government surveillance, the opening of de facto concentration camps (even off shore ones, for now), and an American president (Bush) starting an unjust war under false pretenses, and then also claiming that Americans had too many freedoms, as if these freedoms were a privilege granted by the government, which he and his administration could choose to eliminate at their discretion. Add to that the increased corporate control over the government, and you have a country that seems to really be sliding towards a true dictatorship, even if it is more subtle than Nazi Germany was.

Secondly, tighter gun legislation has worked in other countries, and these countries are not exactly Nazi Germany, either. The numbers of incidents of gun violence are ridiculously smaller in numerous other countries. Even if you compared the combined instance of annual gun violence related deaths in Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and Canada (as well as other large, industrialized nations), they are laughably small when compared to the incidents of gun violence that routinely take place in the United States.

In short, we have a problem.

And this simple fact, that we do have a problem, is another thing that gun advocates seem incapable of acknowledging or admitting, which makes this issue similar to other addiction problems. You only can begin to fix the problem when you first acknowledge that, indeed, you have a problem.

It is not that gun advocates like to see such news stories, especially with such alarming regularity. However, it seems that they collectively shrug their shoulders and argue that such things are bound to happen, that there are some sick people in this world and, irony of ironies, this very fact is an argument for even more guns to be introduced. Some Americans truly believe that the answer to gun violence is to introduce more guns, and that every responsible American needs to own a gun.

Many of these same people will surely argue that too many Americans fail to employ common sense on too many issues.

But in this case, it seems clear to me that tighter gun control laws are the common sense solution to fix a problem that is uniquely American, at least among supposedly peacetime, industrialized nations.

And the proof is that we keep having to talk about this issue, again and again and again.

Until more people begin to employ more common sense on this particular issue, it is almost guaranteed that we will continue to see this debate flare up after more such headlines are made, as more news vans and reporters flock to the scene of the latest seemingly random mass shooting.