By Kevin Wilson
It should come as no surprise that there’s been a lot of talk about the “epidemic” of gun violence in America. Gun control advocates have long used the word epidemic to describe the situation, knowing full well the connotations that come with it. Gun violence, they say, is a plague. It’s a deliberate choice in wording, and one that I really don’t mind.
See, the thing about a plague is that a plague has a definitive cause. A plague is not always curable, but they’re usually treatable. Barring a few of the nastier war germs floating that got cooked up in the Cold War, there’s not much that the microscopic world can throw at us that humanity can’t beat, given the time and resources. Even Black Death and smallpox couldn’t wipe us out, and boy howdy did they try.
The analogy works for gun violence on many levels. Especially since, when you look at it that way, we as a society are the equivalent of 14th century doctors, who had little to no idea what they hell they were doing and frequently made things worse for their patients.
Doctors of that age had a partial picture of how the human body worked, but they were pretty clueless as to why. They could treat broken bones and suture wounds, and lancing boils was easy enough, but they also thought bloodletting was a pretty nifty idea. They realized that irrigating wounds with wine could prevent infection, but they had no idea how that worked and some of the theories behind it were insane. 
When it comes to gun violence, we aren’t even on that level. We’ve heavily restricted access to fully automatic weapons, which seems to have put an end to the days of mobsters shooting up restaurants with Thompson guns. We’ve implemented background checks, which, from a purely statistical perspective, has had no influence on gun crime at all. It hasn’t really helped, but it hasn’t hurt either. It does make most people feel safer about the whole thing, so there’s that. And then there’s the whole gun free zone thing, which has turned countless bars, restaurants, clubs, theaters, and schools into shooting galleries for psychopaths. Good job guys, you’ll have those pesky humours in balance in no time.
If we’re going to keep using the word epidemic in relation to gun violence, we need to have a better understanding of what causes it in order to prevent it. This is one area where the gun lobby has really, and I’m truly sorry about the pun I’m about to commit, shot itself in the foot. Stonewalling attempts to allow government dollars to research the causes of gun violence and come up with more effective controls might play well with the base, but it’s pissed a lot of people off. Not to mention, it’s shortsighted as hell. If we’re going to effectively treat the underlying causes, we need to know what those causes are. Otherwise, it’s like using mercury to treat neurological disorders, which was totally a thing until we realized how toxic the stuff was.
That’s not to say that we’re powerless, even with our limited knowledge on the subject.
The earliest vaccines far predate the advent of germ theory, which stated that most communicable illnesses were caused by microscopic organisms rather than bad air. The Chinese were inoculating folks as early as 1000 CE, and they were as clueless as the rest of us about what actually caused diseases. All they knew was introducing someone to material from smallpox scabs made them immune to the disease.
We too have a form of vaccine against gun violence: responsible gun owners in the right place at the right time.
The oft maligned “good guy with a gun” scenario has become something of a laughing stock for advocates of gun control. Despite several documented incidences of gun owners preventing mass shootings, every time some psycho pulls it off, pundits wail and gnash their teeth about how responsible gun owners just aren’t up to the job.
2A advocates point out that it’s sort of hard for a gun owner to stop a shooting in a gun free zone, where most of these things happen and they’re legally forbidden to carry, but they get shouted down because fuck it, why not? Don’t interrupt a good argument with your pesky facts and figures.
The problem is, we don’t have enough gun owners distributed widely enough for herd immunity to kick in. The concept of herd immunity is simple: there will always be folks who, for whatever reason, cannot be vaccinated. Usually it’s because of a compromised immune system. If enough of the people around them are vaccinated, however, the disease can’t infect any of them and use them as a vector to infect the unvaccinated.
In order for herd immunity to work against gun violence, there needs to be a high enough concentration of vaccinated individuals, in this case those with guns, to shut down the germs, otherwise known as mass shooters, before they can get to the unvaccinated. Unfortunately, the right to carry a weapon in public is far from universal. Some states make it easy. Others make it nearly impossible.
Private businesses are perfectly free to declare themselves Gun Free, which makes it impossible for a law abiding citizen to carry on their premises. And since murdering psychopaths don’t give a good goddamn about a sign in the window proclaiming that guns are bad, they’re free to do their gruesome work inside.
Now, I’m not saying that we just need to let everyone who wants to carry a gun anywhere they want that that’ll magically fix gun violence. I’m not saying that at all, Mr. Strawman Who Takes Quotes Out of Context And Warps Them to Fit Their Argument. Fuck off, your name is too long.
What I’m saying instead is, if we want to get a handle on gun violence epidemic, we need to at least start letting the vaccine get to where it needs to go. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go now, before this metaphor has a chance to get stretched out any further. Damn thing is already so thin it’s practically see through.