
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen entered the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida armed with a Sig Sauer MCX rifle.  He single-handedly ended the lives of 49 people and injured dozens more.  On December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, armed with two rifles and two handguns, killed 14 and injured 21 of Farook’s co-workers after opening fire at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, California.  On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut and ended the lives of 26 people, with 20 of those killed aged at 6 or 7 years old.  Just a couple of months prior to Sandy Hook, James Holmes entered a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado armed with an AR-15, a Remington 870 shotgun, and a .40 police-grade pistol; he killed 12 people and injured 70. In each of these cases, these firearms were legally obtained, and the damage done with them is explicitly severe.  In just four instances, 101 people had their lives prematurely ended with over 140 others likely scarred for life with the memories of these attacks, both physical and mental, forever etched into their beings (Follman).  To many, the system currently in place to keep events like these from happening is not as effective as it should be, and after each event, the flames are fanned with the voices of more and more citizens calling for an increase in measures to help end the seemingly unceasing violence.  I am someone who believes that we should not be afraid that a common, every day experience such as going to school or seeing a movie will be uprooted by a handful or fewer of people armed with guns and ill intent.  I believe that there is a solution to be found in the middle of the two sides that aim to either remove firearms from the equation all together, or put more firearms in the hands of our citizens with the hope that they will stop a bad situation before it gets worse.  In this paper, I will discuss the two common sides of the gun reform argument, look at a handful of gun laws that are in place at the state, national, and international level, and lay out my own ideas of how we can find that middle ground based on extensive and intensive mental health and gun knowledge testing and competency training checks for gun owners to ensure that firearms obtained legally are in the best possible hands.

To begin, let’s take a quick look at the two most common sides one can take when deciding where their opinion lies on the political spectrum when discussing the issue of gun reform, and who are among the most prominent voices that share that opinion.  The left-leaning stance of this argument believes that firearms and their overall ease of availability and purchase are the biggest symptom of the plague of mass shootings that have occurred in the United States over the past five or so years.  They believe that the easiest solution is to simply remove the problem, in this case the guns, from the equation and make them far more difficult to access.  Two of the most prominent and vocal heads on this side are former-president Obama and former-VP Joe Biden.  On the opposite side, the right-leaning stance of this argument believes that guns are not the problem.  The problem stems from people that carry firearms with malice and ill intent, aiming to cause harm instead of prevent it.  They believe that the best solution to help prevent more mass shootings is to ease up on gun restrictions and allow for more citizens to own and carry them.  Thus, the civilians that have guns on them when a crisis strikes are more likely to help put an end to it before things take a devastating turn.  The NRA is the most vocal and prominent voice with this stance, and it is shared by a handful of other politicians, such as Florida Governor Rick Scott.

With the mention of Scott, and the recent proximity, chronologically speaking, of the mass shooting that took place in Orlando, I would now like to quickly look at gun laws in the state of Florida.  The state of Florida has amongst the most relaxed firearm laws in the country, and the ease in which Mateen obtained his firearms begins to make much more sense.  In the state of Florida, if one is at least eighteen years old and does not have a felony conviction or a history of domestic violence, a prospective buyer may purchase and possess rifles, shotguns, and handguns (of the exact model used in the shooting, if one wished) without the need of a permit or a license, and the buyer is not required to have his newly acquired firearms registered.  The only permit needed is one to carry a handgun (NRA-ILA).  Otherwise, you are completely within your rights to do what you wish once your purchase is completed.  With that said, is should no longer be of any surprise at how easily someone like Mateen could land the type of high-power firearms he did.

Scott, however, does not believe that the second amendment (and thus, by extension, the laws in place regarding firearms in his state) is not to blame for the massacre that occurred at the Pulse nightclub shooting.  Instead, he points to the terrorist group ISIS, and claims that they are the bigger threat, believing that our legislators should focus more on dealing with them than dealing with gun reform.  In a video of an interview, Scott says “The second amendment didn’t kill anybody.  This is ISIS.  This is evil.  This is radical Islam… We’re not focusing enough on ISIS…  Let’s focus on destroying ISIS” (Lin).  When asked about whether he feels he should feel any sense of responsibility for the massacre, as his gun laws are among the most relaxed in the country, Scott responds “Let’s remember, the second amendment has been around for over two hundred years.  [The second amendment] didn’t kill innocent people, evil killed innocent people.”  To boil it down to a less wordy answer, no.  He does not.  He did mention, however, that he feels someone on the terrorist watch list should not have had access to the types of weapons he had access to, something that I very much agree with.  I will touch upon that in a bit more detail later.

Another point I would like to address is a method in which criminals can illegally obtain firearms, but the initial purchase is completely legal, called “straw purchasing” (Parnell).  This method is typically employed by gun traffickers that often arm gang members and other criminals that do not want their names attached to the firearms that they purchase.  Parnell, the author of Gun Control: Background, Regulation, and Legislation, devoted the first chapter of this book to the concept of straw purchasing. Upon numerous interviews with several former straw purchasers or traffickers, Parnell was able to showcase how simple it is for criminals to obtain firearms in this manner.  Parnell explains that traffickers would commonly pick the “easy” stores to buy guns in bulk at, with one interviewee stating that he purchased his guns at “the easiest store in Georgia.  That was the word – you want some guns, you go to [that store].”  This same interviewee testified that he purchased at least fifty-five guns over five visits to this store.  Another said that “buying guns was like buying candy” after purchasing two 9mm Hi-Points and a Mac-11 in one trip to a pawn shop in South Carolina.  Parnell also stated that dealers often sold guns to straw purchasers that knew nothing about the guns they were buying, with the traffickers often being in the store with their straws.  The straws were often coached by traffickers, and despite suspicions on the dealer’s end, they would still sell the guns to the straws.  One former gun saleswoman said that though she did not know the term “straw purchase”, she recalled customers buying “multiple inexpensive handguns of a particular brand”, and in one instance sold ten handguns of this brand to one man, and in her interview suggested she figured the customer would be “selling them to children on the streets, or to gangs.”  This instance also suggests that part of the problem is the lack of training instilled in employees of gun dealers.  For example, a woman who worked a Georgia gun store for two years told interviewers she was instructed only to sell guns to people who checked “no” on all the questions on the form required for purchase and who provided a valid ID. When interviewed, she did not know what a straw purchase was. A former employee at a store in South Carolina said his only instructions were to be careful not to sell to anyone who as underage; the owner did not instruct him on straw purchases or other suspicious sales.  

However, Parnell’s chapter also explains that some stores and dealers can pick up on these types of purchases and put an end to them.  For example, the owner of an Ohio store told interviewers he and his employees were constantly on the lookout for suspicious buyers.  The types of behaviors that were common red flags are as follows: Instances in which a man picked out a gun and then the woman with him attempted to buy it; a money exchange inside the store between two people who came in together; women who came into the store alone to buy guns and did not appear to have a sensible answer about what gun they wanted and why; payment with cash, especially small bills, as this suggests the customer earned the money selling drugs; and people who were intoxicated.  This kind of vigilance, while scarce and otherwise untested, resulted in zero cases of straw purchases in that Ohio store, while another store within 45 miles of this vigilant one, had at least five prosecutions over an eleven-year span that involved the straw purchase of 235 guns.  Suffice to say, all it takes is a little bit of care and attention to the problem and one can resolve it.

For some, this kind of evidence matched with the seemingly unending waves of mass shootings is enough to call for a nationwide outlaw of firearms.  These same voices aim to model themselves off the Australian government’s nationwide ban on firearms enacted in 1996.  To provide some context, a mass shooting in at Port Arthur in Tasmania resulted in the deaths of 35 people, and just twelve days later, Australian state and federal government officials agreed to enact uniform gun control laws (Chapman), in stark contrast to the United States, where it has been over four years since a classroom full of first graders was gunned down and murdered and no new laws regarding gun control have been passed; but I digress.  These new gun laws outright banned rapid-fire long guns, resulting in over 700,000 semi-automatic and pump action rifles and shotguns being removed and destroyed from an adult population of approximately 12 million.  Chapman spent ten years researching the results of this outright ban on firearms, and his words on these results are far too lengthy to represent through this medium.  Plus, he uses tables and graphs that I cannot place in this essay.  So, to boil that massive quote down into a smaller statement, and since the graphs are not presented in this essay, I say this: the ban brought a significant drop to gun related crime and death via homicide and/or suicide.  The ban did as it was intended: it brought an end to mass shootings and drastically reduced the amount of deaths caused by firearms.  To put this statement to numbers, there have been no mass shootings to the scale of Port Arthur over the nearly 21 years since these laws were adopted.  There have been five incidents involving firearms committed since then (averaging to one incident every four plus years), with only fifteen deaths and twelve injuries, which is significantly less than the statistics for Port Arthur (Wikipedia contributors).  While the loss of life is still very saddening, the undeniable success of this model is cause enough for many on the left to call for this kind of legislature to come to order.

On the flip side of this coin, John R. Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition glances at how guns, in real-life scenarios, acted as the deterrent they are meant to be and saved everyday people from what could have turned into a very sticky situation.  One such situation described a woman being attacked in her car by two men attempting to open both front doors of her vehicle.  She merely brandished her gun and shouted, causing the men to flee and allowing the almost-victim to continue going about her business (Lott).  This case allows the thought that open carry laws may indeed help prevent crime and save lives.  There is also a case in which an Arizona state trooper was ambushed along a highway just outside of California.  The man lay in wait along a median on Interstate 10, and shot the trooper as he exited his vehicle to return to the area he thought someone had been firing at his car.  He was hit once (or possibly twice, per the article), and was wounded, making his right arm ultimately useless, but the trooper still engaged in hand-to-hand combat.  Fortunately, a man driving along the interstate witnessed the altercation and pulled over to assist the trooper.  The man asked if the trooper needed his assistance, and with an affirmative response, he armed himself with the weapon in his car, and confronted the man assaulting the trooper.  When the man did not comply to stop his assault, the civilian shot (and eventually killed) the assailant (Guarino).  This same argument can be used to suggest that though murders and other crimes perpetrated by firearms may rise, the overall number of murders and rapes are likely to fall, as murderers and rapists no longer hold the advantage when attacking their victims.  As such, these measures allow for the right to argue that we do not need to do anything with our right to bear arms besides actually using that right and arming ourselves for defense purposes.

Both sides of this argument possess evidence that actively point to why their methods work.  And both methods do work.  However, I believe that I have a solution that allows for compromise on both ends, implementing ideas that appeal to both sides.  I believe that educating and training our citizens in the use of firearms is now an absolute necessity.  Much like requiring new drivers to take a series of knowledge- and skills-based exams to determine whether they are fit to get behind the wheel of a car on their own, I believe that knowledge- and skills-based exams should be a requirement for anyone wishing to purchase, own, and use a gun.  Before being able to take the exams, one must be subjected to extensive mental health and background checks, and those with violent histories or mental illness, or those on the terrorist watch or no-fly list, will not be able to take these exams, and thus not own a firearm.  The knowledge proficiency exam would pertain to the ideas of knowing when and where to use a firearm, how to keep it clean and properly maintained and being able to put to paper how the firearm itself works, both internally and externally, depending on what kind of gun it is.  Once this exam is passed, a person can now purchase a firearm, and will need to be trained in its proper use. The handling proficiency exam would take place a good amount of time after the knowledge exam, as it would require the training to be able to pass it.  This portion would require gun owners to quickly and efficiently take apart their guns and reassemble them.  A portion of this exam would also include being able to hit a target with a high success rate from a set distance.  My idea here is that once this portion of the exam is passed, gun owners can then receive a license to carry, provided the weapon isn’t over-the-top and ultimately unnecessary to be carried in public, as they are now properly trained in their use and are now far less likely to cause an accidental death should the need to use the firearm arise.  To maintain this license, owners must use all registered firearms at a range at least twice a month, and pass a biannual proficiency exam on each firearm.  Should they fail either of these, they lose their ability to carry any gun in public until they can pass both portions, in which case they will regain their license.  After some further research into these ideas, my model of helping to prevent the purchase of firearms by those who would do harm with them is essentially modeled after the state of California’s sale and transfer requirements (State of California), but with a few extra bones to throw to each side.

That may seem like a lot of hoops to jump through, but in my opinion this is the best way to ensure that people don’t lose their right to own a firearm, while also making sure that guns are out of the hands of people that are most likely to cause harm with them, and in the hands of the people that will properly use them.  There will likely be people on both sides of the issue that now feel either less safe, as there are now more guns out on the streets than before, or feel like their second amendment rights are being infringed by being required to pass a bunch of tests to buy and use their guns.  And both sides may have points, but the only way to see how well an idea will work is to have it implemented and see the effect it has on the variables.  If it lowers gun crime and violence rates, then it did as it was intended.  If it does the opposite, then it will be revised and changed to reverse it.  Either way, reform is needed, and I think we can all agree that it’s needed soon.
