In the light of the recent mass killing in San Bernardino, California, people around the world must be shaking their heads and wondering what is happening in the United States. The country spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting terrorism abroad to prevent it from entering the country but it is unwilling or do not have the political will to stop or at least lessen the uncontrolled proliferation of firearms. Because of this failure, mass killings is taking place with frightening frequency and regularity killing a lot more people than terrorism.
It is something, as the frustrated President Obama said, uniquely American because it does not happen anywhere else in the world. In all the developed world, the United States has the most liberal laws on gun ownership. In fact, the right to keep and own firearms is enshrined in the second amendment of the US constitution. It is therefore not surprising that it has also the worst gun violence in the whole industrialized world and the highest gun ownership in the world.
Some publications have stated that since 2012, there have been 1,042 mass killings in the US. For this year alone, 353 mass killings have taken place. Mass killing is defined as causing a casualty of at least four to include the perpetrator. In 2013, there were 33,636 firearm related deaths in the US. Of this figure, 63 percent or 21,175 were suicide deaths while 12,461 were the result of homicides. Another astonishing figure is that although the US population constitute only 5 percent of the world’s total, the country owns 42 percent of all the guns. And while science and experience has already shown that in order to lessen the number of violent gun deaths, there must be reduction in gun ownership or at least make it more difficult for people to purchase firearm so easily.
The US, however, for one reason or another refuses to buy this proven fact. Even with the San Bernardino killings which is now classified as terror related, the US Senate just refused to add regulations that would introduce stricter background checks for prospective gun buyers. In spite of the polls suggesting that more people throughout the country do favor stricter background checks, every effort to introduce such a procedure never went past first base. The right to bear arms in the US has a long history.
It seems that during colonial times, the British prohibited people from owning firearms and the people rebelled against this prohibition. Gun ownerships were also a sort of protection of the people to form militias to protect themselves against abusive governments. But times have changed. The British are no longer the colonial masters and there is now a way to protect people from abusive governments and that is by voting them out of office. Yet, the tradition lingers causing the country so much pain that with all the county’s sophistication, it seems unable to come to grips with the problem.
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On the other side of the globe, we here in the Philippines have one of the strictest gun laws in the world. It is difficult to own and license a firearm and much harder to get a permit to carry the firearm outside one’s residence. Indeed, even owning one low caliber bullet can land one in jail for six years. This is one of the primary reasons why the extortion industry of bullet planting to extort money from unsuspecting travelers has been going on for years.
Our National Bureau of Investigation after much delay has just confirmed that indeed there is so much irregularity going on in our airports and ports. That it took the NBI that long to confirm what many people already know is shocking. But let us go back to the issue of gun ownership in the country. Our police estimate that there are more than 600,000 loose firearms in the country. This figure was arrived at by counting the number of gun owners who failed to renew their licenses. While still in government, I argued that these firearms were technically not loose in the sense that the location of the firearms are known. Loose firearms must be defined as those that cannot be accounted for in the files of the police. And there are a lot of these firearms that the police cannot account. Our estimate is that there are over a million of these loose firearms all over the country.
One proof of this is that almost all gun deaths are caused by untraceable firearms. Daily scanning of our papers and broadcast media never fails to mention the number of people getting killed by firearms every day. The police has not been issuing official figures on the number of people getting killed by the use of firearms but I suspect that the figure is close or even more than the US figure. Here, we make a distinction between homicide and murder. So the two figures are separate but if we add both, it would be a lot which shows, that even with very strict gun ownerships laws, it is not a guarantee to a more peaceful country. The trick is maybe to have simpler rules that can be implemented properly and efficiently.
Difficult and complicated regulations only make it difficult for responsible gun owners to comply and would only benefit the criminal underworld. Striking a balance is understandably difficult but in this age of terrorism where there is no longer a place that is safe, it is a must that the government must find a good balance so that law abiding citizens have the means to be able to protect themselves.