Recently, Neoliberals have held a march they call “March for Our Lives.” They claim that the solution to shootings and, more specifically, school shootings, is strict gun control. There are some in this march who only want to see automatic weapons banned. According to CNN, the majority of crimes have been committed by handguns and not assault rifles. In this way, they seem to imply that some deaths are better than more deaths. If these people truly believed that a gun ban would eliminate crimes, then there is no reason they shouldn’t be advocating a complete gun ban.

Allow us to consider the flat gun ban that many in this march believe would work. Firstly, more than 67% of gun death is not homicide; instead, it is mostly suicide that causes gun violence. So, 33% of gun deaths are homicides and 13,000 people killed by guns in the U.S. per year. It’s estimated that these weapons are used defensively 1.2 million times a year, and that about 17% of those people believe that if they had not used a gun, someone would have died. That is about 204,000 deaths stopped per year. These numbers far outweigh the number of homicides “caused by guns.”

Another thing Neoliberals fail to acknowledge on this topic is the fact that, as gun sales increase, crime remains the same or decreases. This statistic means one of two things, that more guns mean less crime, or, that there is no correlation at all. Furthermore, there is a misconception that lack of mass shootings in Australia is due to actions passed in 1996. This objection is severely flawed for two main reasons. First, because the same people claim there have been no mass killings since 1996 when that is untrue, as there have been plenty of instances where guns or different weapons killed numerous people. Furthermore, the data on crime rate is mainly inconclusive and shows the gun ban had little to no effect on crime rate or suicide as when certain things like suicide or homicide were going up, it continued to go up, and vice versa.

Finally, as a communist, I believe banning guns would be a massive detriment to the working class and crush any chance of a revolution. The working class will fear the state when they are without arms and shy away from a strike. Furthermore, we must have guns to defend against Government tyranny. The objection to this is always “You will never be able to defend against the government even if you wanted to.” Citizens should still have a chance at fighting injustice. Even if odds are in the government’s favor, that doesn’t mean we give people no chance at fighting. Action can still be taken in the form of strikes, and if workers have arms, they will be more confident to do so. Also, farmers in Vietnam and other countries the U.S has gone to war with were “armed citizens,” and the U.S. had a hard time fighting those people despite being more than double the country’s size.

Sources:

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/handgun-homicides/

https://crimeresearch.org/2014/09/more-misleading-information-from-bloombergs-everytown-for-gun-safety-on-guns-analysis-of-recent-mass-shootings/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-by-the-numbers/#YearlyGunMurders

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-sexual-violence

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-trump-vows-care-bump-stocks-executive-action/story?id=53421961

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/cnsnewscom-staff/more-guns-less-gun-violence-between-1993-and-2013

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia

http://www.gunsandcrime.org/auresult.html