Editor’s Note: This is the last part in a four-part series on mental health and gun violence.
It seems that a lot of people are under the impression, for some reason or another, that civilians absolutely need the right to possess fully automatic assault rifles. I’m not speaking of hunting rifles, and I’m not even speaking of semi-automatic rifles — both of which are topics beyond which I wish to mention now. I am only speaking of full-auto assault rifles.
I’m not saying those trained to use such weaponry shouldn’t have them. They should. Armed forces should, of course, be able to arm themselves with the weaponry necessary for their jobs. The police, the military, the National Guard, SWAT operatives — for these people to require fully automatic weapons is perfectly reasonable.
Civilians, on the other hand, don’t need them. It’s that simple. The weapons, for them, are completely unnecessary. As a boy, I loved my bikes and thought it would be cool to have one that could go faster than those that I owned. Yet, for what I used my bike for, speed was unnecessary. What civilians need weapons for, fully automatic functionality is equally unnecessary.
Perhaps such rifles are interesting in sport; perhaps they are fun to “play” with. But neither of those things justify the need for them — they only detail where the want for them stems from.
Human shaped targets are not threats to our safety, the meat of a whitetail deer is useless when riddled with bullet holes, zombies aren’t real and Johnny from down the street isn’t the action hero he thinks he is. Even in the most extreme circumstances, such as that of an invasion, the people whose job it is to respond will possess the proper weaponry. We already have more than enough guns to take care of ourselves until help arrives in this nation. We don’t need to be able to throw countless amounts of lead at anything per minute.
For those of us who think ourselves soldiers, but who have never been trained to be such, let it be known that that is a dangerous mentality.
Vigilante justice works better in movies. Your judgment of situations has not been tested. We don’t need someone behind a fully automatic rifle who might — in a fit of panic — shoot anything that moves while he’s trying to protect the neighborhood from a passing group that he mistakenly deemed as hostile. Even the people most trained for situations such as these often make mistakes.
We just don’t need fully automatic weapons. No matter how fun we think they are, or for what hypothetical situation we think we might need them, they simply aren’t necessary for civilians. This isn’t a debate over gun ownership in general — the constitution grants you that right — this is merely a judgment as to what we truly need; a beckoning for us to evaluate our wants against our needs, just as many would ask their own children to do.
Jordan Marcell is a 20-year-old English and studio art sophomore from Geismar, Louisiana.