Controlling gun ownership

Published by the Visayan Daily Star Publications, Inc.

NINFA R. LEONARDIA Editor-in-Chief & President

CARLA P. GOMEZ Editor CHERYL CRUZ Desk Editor PATRICK PANGILINAN Busines Editor NIDA A. BUENAFE Sports Editor RENE GENOVE Bureau Chief, Dumaguete MAJA P. DELY Advertising Coordinator

CARLOS ANTONIO L. LEONARDIA Administrative Officer

The gun control debate in the United States has been given attention once again after the massacre of 20 young children, aged between 6-7 years old, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. US President Barack Obama vowed at a vigil in Newtown: “I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators, in an effort at preventing more tragedies like this”. He adds: “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

Time will tell if President Obama will be able to gather the political will to do anything about his country’s lax gun ownership laws, which currently allow any American to purchase and own powerful firearms such the assault rifle that the shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, used to kill 20 young children and 8 adults in cold blood. If this latest deadly incident, that follows a disturbing pattern involving a cocktail of unstable individuals, powerful guns, and ultimately, the death of innocents; cannot result in changes to laws regarding gun ownership in the US, then Americans may have to brace themselves for more of the same.

Elementary school, mosque, or movie theater shootings may not be as common in the Philippine context, but what we do have in common with the USA is a surplus of unlicensed firearms, thanks to the shoddy enforcement of gun ownership laws. There are no hard figures, but the Philippine National Police estimates that there are at least 600,000 loose firearms in the country. These are guns that belong to people whose backgrounds have not been checked for criminal connections, or severe psychological problems. Even among licensed firearms holders, our screening process is put into doubt every time these supposedly responsible gun owners use their weapons in violence or use their firearms to throw their weight around.

There are those who say that guns don’t kill people, people do. Granted that is true, it is still the obligation of any responsible government to make it harder, if not impossible, for the criminal-minded and the crazy ones to acquire guns so they wouldn’t be able to inflict so much damage to our communities.

 Let us not wait for our own version of Sandy Hook before we take this problem seriously.*