It’s NOT About Saving Lives

“If we save just one life it is worth it”. This is the battle cry of gun control advocates and legislators every time a new gun control bill is introduced. They tell us that restricting guns, banning what they call “Assault” weapons and further infringing on the only right that explicitly states “Shall not be infringed” is key to saving the lives of our fellow Americans and especially our children.

If they truly wanted to save lives, they would introduce legislation to ban tobacco, products that kill over 400,000 Americans every year. Products that kill an estimated 10% of those people WHO NEVER USE IT! (second hand smoke, anyone?)

To be clear, we are not calling for the ban of tobacco products. We are pointing out the hypocrisy of the cries for saving lives when tobacco kills more people that DON’T use it than people murdered or accidentally killed by guns. (Suicides account for approximately 2/3 of all gun deaths in the US.)

They also like to point out that guns only serve one purpose: to kill people. This is obviously not true. Guns are used for several purposes. One of the biggest uses of firearms is target shooting. I remember shooting pop cans with my Dad using his 22LR rifle when I was a young boy. Another major use of firearms is Hunting – whether for food or to help control populations of species, guns are used daily for this purpose. Another major use of guns is self defense. It is estimated that there are between 500,000 and 2 million self defense uses of guns every year in America. The actual number is difficult to pin down, since most self defense instance result in no shots fired. Simply having the gun is enough to scare the perpetrator away.

It is estimated that there are more guns in the US than there are people. The average gun owner owns around 4.8 guns (I wonder if this includes the number of guns lost in “boating accidents”?) With so many guns, the fact that approximately the same number of people are killed in the US each year by drunk drivers, using vehicles that were not “designed to kill” as the number of people killed in gun homicides each year is rather telling.

It’s not about the gun – it is all about the control.