The deadly Sunday biker battle at a Waco, Texas breastaurant has convinced one University of Texas at Austin professor that Americans aren’t cut out for the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.
John Traphagan, a professor of religious studies and anthropology at UT, wrote in an op-ed for The Dallas Morning News that the most overlooked security threat to this country is its “own heavily armed population” and that America’s culture does not “lend itself well to allowing the proliferation of guns.” (RELATED:
“Americans do not seem to be able to handle gun ownership in a way that permits maintenance of a civil society,” Traphagan stated.
“There is simply no need for a civilized society to tolerate the type of gun-related violence that Americans seem to accept as normal,” the professor continued. “Other modern industrial countries have realized, in some cases long ago, that it is unnecessary for people in a free society to have easy access to guns.”
He also dismissed notions that making it easier for citizens to purchase firearms would make society safer. In this professor’s opinion, only gun control would make America “more secure.”
“The solution to gun-related crime is not further arming the public,” Traphagan declared. “It involves enacting comprehensive gun control laws that prohibit many forms of gun ownership, significantly curtailing or eliminating access to and the ability to purchase guns, and implementing programs in which the government confiscates or purchases illegal guns already in circulation among the public.”
He concludes, “our proven inability to handle widespread gun ownership suggests strongly that the way to do this [solve the issue of gun violence] is to deeply restrict access to and ownership of most types of guns.”
Even though, Traphagan is confident that this will resolve America’s apparent gun problem, a 2014 study by a Quinnipiac University professor showed that in states that instituted measures that restricted gun ownership — such as banning concealed-carry and the purchase of assault rifles — there was either no substantial effect on firearm-related murders or the states saw the number of gun-related deaths go up.
The study concluded that “restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level.”