FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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US should consider right-to-arms referendum

US should consider right-to-arms referendum

The Latest tragedy warrants a genuine show of political courage

There have been more than 10 shootings in United States schools already in 2018, and we’re only halfway through February. The familiar debate over the need for tougher gun controls has resurfaced in America, but no one really expects the outcome to be any different. 
Gun politics is immense in the US, the world’s reigning superpower. It overshadows all concerns that citizens might have about the frenziedly cherished constitutional right to own a firearm plays a dangerous role in causing one tragedy after another.
In the latest incident, at least 17 were killed and more than a dozen wounded in a mass shooting at a high school at Parkland, Florida. It’s one of the country’s worst school shootings, but that awful record is likely to be short-lived. 
Considering that the number of school shootings in the United States is approaching 20 halfway through February, more terrible tragedies can be expected.
In most other countries, the right to easily buy and casually possess firearms would have been constitutionally nullified a long time ago. In the United States, the pro-gun camp has strong ideological backing, but critics say the real reason why the right-to-own is politically invincible is that the gun industry is so powerful and influential.
America is not given to public referendums, in part because its people traditionally have high regard for what the founding fathers put in the constitution. The issue of gun control, however, keeps testing everyone’s limits, and the mounting number of tragic incidents involving easily accessible firearms has begged the question as to why the world’s “most democratic” country doesn’t ask its citizens how they feel about gun ownership.
According to a source cited on Wikipedia, US civilians own somewhere between 270 million to 310 million firearms and 35-42 per cent of households contain at least one gun. 
The numbers are staggering, and explain the frequency of gun-related tragedies. In addition to mass killings by evident psychopaths, the United States is reported to have a rate of firearm homicide 25 times higher than the average in high-income nations. And it’s much higher than in several major developed nations, such as Japan and Britain, where gun laws are far more restrictive.
The figures are ammunition for the anti-gun camp, which is dismayed by the fact that the number violent gun deaths in the US is surpassed only in a small number of Latin American countries with high crime rates and weak law enforcement. 
Gun-rights supporters essentially cite self defence as a rationale for owning firearms. It’s an argument that can stop the debate cold, since one side says keeping guns out of the hands of criminals reduces any need for armed self-defence, while the other side insists that criminals can always find a gun, regardless of the law.
The key facts to keep in mind are that the number of gun-related cases in the US is unusually high and steadily climbing, and that the gun industry’s political lobby is wealthy and influential. 
These facts should be enough to warrant a referendum that asks Americans what they really want. It’s the most democratic way to solve the long-standing impasse.
There are many types of political courage. An extreme approach would be to revoke the right to own guns and make ownership so difficult as to discourage most people from trying. A softer way would be to get tough on guns for a designated period, say two years, and see what happens. A referendum would be both courageous and democratic – but opponents of guns, having felt the prevailing winds in “the land of the free”, can be forgiven if they’re pessimistic.

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