By Josh Beaumont | Contributor
Gun control is an important issue; that goes without saying. Anyone who's paying attention to the world must recognize the prevalence of gun violence in America, as well as the myriad responses each new mass shooting brings. These responses can range anywhere from calling for outright confiscation of guns bigger than a standard handgun to ensuring the public has enough of the "good guys" armed to stop a mass shooting before it begins. I fall somewhere in the middle: I believe the issue lies with our system of background checks and mental health screenings before anything else.
Before I delve any further, I want to get my biases out of the way. I'm a constitutional conservative who does not believe the Second Amendment is there to enable me to succeed during my next hunting excursion (I don't even hunt). The Second Amendment is just as important to securing our liberty as any of the other Amendments; I don't believe the founding fathers would have included it among the amendments if it weren't. They viewed a standing army as a potential threat to citizens' freedoms, and part of their response to that threat was an armed citizenry in the event of a government turning tyrannical-as Great Britain did toward the colonies.
Now I can get to my main stance. Modern America faces a decision in the wake of so many gun-related killings. If we look just at the mass shootings that have occurred in the past few years (the Orlando nightclub, San Bernardino, the Charleston church massacre, Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Aurora movie theater, etc.), we find a trend. Though the guns were bought legally, not one of those killers should or would have passed a more thorough background check for terror-oriented radicalization or racial supremacist sympathies. Neither would they have passed a more rigid mental health screening.
I believe that blanket bans on certain classes of weaponry-other than the bans already in place, which are reasonable-only infringe upon the rights of citizens who have done nothing to deserve this infringement. If I am going to take a stance as the type of conservative I claim to be, I can't support such bans when there is such an obvious gap in our system of background checks and mental health screenings. As I said, citizens have a Constitutional right to form militias.
Gun control is obviously a far more complicated and nuanced issue than a few paragraphs can cover. For instance, I didn't even touch on the rampant gun-related killings in inner cities like Chicago and Detroit. But I believe founding our discussions on "Which weapons should we blanket ban?" can potentially threaten the liberties for which this country stands. The way we move forward is to patch the holes in a system that has allowed so many monsters to get their hands on weapons. If the pandemic of mass shootings remains after we've improved our structure of background checks and mental health screenings, then we can open up the conversation about cutting corners on people's rights.
