Due to the nature of our constitution, which places an emphasis on individual liberty and the amendments that constrain the governments ability to restrict certain rights, the mechanisms we currently have in place to prohibit gun ownership are limited. To employ these mechanisms people must be found guilty of a particular category of crime or mentally unfit. Additionally our judicial system of controls often fails us, allowing those who should have their 2nd Amendment rights revoked to plea bargain and receive a reduced sentence where they no longer meet the criteria of being prohibited from owning a firearm.
Amending the constitution is, by design a very difficult process, requiring ratification of 38 states. Additionally, there doesn’t seem to be an appetite to address the criminal nature of gun violence either through our judicial system, by fixing the failures and weaknesses of the processes or through social sciences to identify the environments and behaviors that are precursors to criminal violence. Instead, there seems to be a push, through labelling, through framing, through language, to “criminalize” guns and gun ownership and instill in people the idea that guns and gun ownership is unacceptable, that it is irresponsible.
Every gun owner is a responsible gun owner until they aren’t.
Until is being used here as preposition to indicate the time when something will happen and become true. The above sentence can be expanded according to the usage of the word until to read:
A gun owner is responsible up to a point in time where they will cease being responsible and commit a crime.
The message here seems clear, merely owning a gun turns a person into a ticking time bomb. A person can be good until they own a gun, then without notice will become a monster, engaging in a murderous rampage as easily as exceeding the speed limit. Because just owning the gun proves that there is a monster lurking, just waiting to be released from the sound non-gun owning mind that was keeping it in check.
We are told that there is no such thing as a responsible gun owner. There is no such thing as a law abiding gun owner. You can’t own a gun and be responsible, because each and every gun owner is just one small push away from wheeeeeee!
So the problem of gun violence morphs from criminal activity and the people who use guns to commit unspeakable acts of violence, to guns and people who own guns. Gun owners are referred to as idiots, knuckle draggers, and fetishists just to name a few and guns become “killing machines” or are placed in the context of a phallus. The picture being painted is that guns are bad; they are “death machines”, ergo only irresponsible bad people own death machines. A gun is really just a phallus and gun owners fondle and stroke their guns just like a penis, it’s a form of masturbation, and masturbation is bad.
Such imagery and language does not lend credence to nor enlist support for finding viable solutions to the problem of gun violence. Rather it is divisive, belittling, serving only to demonize gun owners and delegitimize gun ownership. Such labelling, framing and language is every bit as much fear mongering as anything spouted by the NRA-ILA.