This article is part two of three in a series on issues surrounding gun control.
The role of guns in American society goes far beyond mass shootings. Over 1,000 gun deaths have occurred since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, according to a Jan. 23 Slate.com article.
However, many do not see increased gun control as the only solution. According to a poll conducted by CNN, Time Magazine and ORC International this month, 61 percent of Americans believe that stricter gun control laws would not reduce gun violence in America.
Curbing crime
Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners' Action League (GOAL), argued that gun control should be approached differently. GOAL is the official state association for Massachusetts of the National Rifle Association (NRA). According to Wallace, gun control should focus more on cracking down on criminal gun users.
"The gun control debate always focuses on what the lawful gun owner can and can't do and unfortunately it really distracts from the real message we need to be sending ... which is dealing with the human criminal element," he said. "Most of [the president's and governor's proposals] were a result of the Newtown [shooting]. If you look at all the proposals from the governor and from the president, none of them actually deals with the killer in the schoolyard."
Wallace recounted a meeting he had five years ago with the public safety officials who run the gun licensing system in Massachusetts. When asked how many people applied for a license and were refused, they replied that they don't keep that information.
"I said, 'Really? So you're spending millions of dollars on a database of the people who can own guns, but you're not spending a dime tracking the people who you know shouldn't be in possession of guns?'" Wallace said. "I think that's why the gun laws here in Massachusetts are so inverted ... they need to reverse them to the point where they're actually going after the bad guys rather than worrying about what we can and cannot own."
Although pro-gun and gun control groups have differing views on how to best tackle the issue, they both try to address the need to curb gun violence and crime.
"People have their second amendment right to own a firearm and if they can pass a background check and if they're not doing anything that looks like falsifying an ID or purchasing for someone else, that's not the business that we're into," Federal Relations Officer for Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's Office of Intergovernmental Relations Jake Sullivan said. "We're after criminals - not gun control, but crime control."
Blaming the media
Throughout the continuing national discourse on gun control, legislators and the American public alike have scrutinized the effects of guns and graphic violence in film, television and video games.
"The entertainment industry has long been blamed for creating a glorification of violence, so whenever there's some kind of mass murder, some awful episode like Aurora, Colo. or the Newtown shootings or Virginia Tech, people point their finger at the entertainment industry and say, 'you need to stop doing what you're doing or reduce what you're doing,'" John Richard Skuse, professor of political science Jeff Berry said. "And it doesn't seem to ever happen. I don't expect anything to change on that."
NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre has blamed the entertainment industry for the proliferation of gun violence. Senior Adam Cohen, who has been a recreational and sport shooter for eight years, suggested that this assumption is unfounded.
"The argument against violence in video games has been made since forever, since as long as video games have existed. Is there perhaps a rotten apple who saw and played a violent game and so he decided to enact all that violence? Perhaps," Cohen said. "[But] I think we're capitalizing on isolated cases to try to make an argument about the whole thing. Correlation is not causation. In this case, violence in video games is not something that's causing an epidemic of shooters and murderers. It's just not."
Both the gun lobby and gun control supporters often challenge the media's role in both covering and perpetuating violent gun-related incidents.
"I think another issue that's pretty salient is that these massacres attract so much media attention," Nick Vik, founder of Tufts' current Gun Club, said. "I think that the fact that we're sickly fascinated with these shootings, with the killers, and the fact that these people's faces are being flashed across television screens ... there's sort of a sick glorification going on of some of the people who perpetrated these atrocities. I think that's a huge problem as well."
Vik, a senior, also took issue with the lack of attention that the other 1,000 gun deaths since the Newtown shooting have received. Homicide, suicide and accidents, he argued, need to be included in the conversation.
"I think that this needs to be something that is discussed not only with respect to Sandy Hook and with respect to the Colorado movie theater shooting, but also in general - the individual killings, the murders, the gang violence - because those things are just as important even if they don't capture as much media attention," Vik said.
An issue of public health
While many take strong stances in the conversation around gun control, some - including director of the Tufts community health program Edith Balbach - focus more broadly on America's prevalent culture of gun violence.
"Most countries in the world treat gun violence and gun control as a public health issue. That is, if you're going to create an environment in which all people have the ability to attain good health, if that's your number one value and you bring that framing to gun control, obviously what you're going to look at doing is having as few guns as possible out there," Balbach said. "In the United States, we have not traditionally framed gun control as a public health issue. We talk about it as a rights issue ... and that makes a big difference because the question is not what would be the impact on the health of this community if we're all heavily armed. The question is, 'do we all have a right to have our guns.'"
Balbach likened this situation to the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States.
"Did that make the world a safer place because we were getting progressively bigger missiles on both sides? Absolutely not," she said. "So when you have people saying the only way for our community to be safe - because criminals are going to have guns - is we all have to have guns too, then criminals have to get better guns. You can sort of see how you have these little mini arms races going around."
While many goals of gun control proponents' are very short-term, Cohen feels that the discussion should take a more long-term approach to improve the health of the wider community.
"There are two very different ways of looking at it - there's a long-term solution, which is how do you end gun violence in America, which is through education, through improving education and job opportunities in low income areas because when you look at statistics, that's where most of the gun crime is," he said. "But
that's [decades] of trying to forcibly change the culture of the country. So that doesn't appeal to people when you say how do you stop gun violence because that's a century from now when we're finally going to see the real effect of it."
Although Balbach agreed that there should be a ban on assault weapons and high magazines, she argued that it would be a mistake to assume that enacting this legislation will automatically ensure safety. Rather, Balbach advocates conversation-based grassroots initiatives that encourage healthy environments, as well as starting to approach gun control primarily as a public health issue.
"I think building a greater understanding of the hazard you're bringing into your home, and how to mitigate that hazard, and certainly thoughtful consideration on is it worth it," Balbach said. "You know, to really get people to engage the significant public health issues before they exercise that right to bear arms. I think it couldn't help but make things better."
"There are a lot of public health issues out there where we can't have perfect solutions, because perfect doesn't exist," she added. "But we've got to be able to do better than this. That's kind of my bottom line - we've got to do better than this."
