Let’s talk about handguns. Have you ever heard of anyone hunting deer with a handgun? Practicing marksmanship? Going skeet shooting? I can almost guarantee that you haven’t. Handguns have only one purpose: taking the lives of human beings. Handguns kill more people in this country than all other weapons combined. Most of us can agree that killing our fellow human beings is wrong, except perhaps in self-defense, and yet out of 8,259 murders in 1999, only 154 were classified as “justifiable homicides.”

What possible justification could there be, then, to allow the circulation of such utterly destructive weapons? Well. Let’s take a look at the arguments. Number one on the gun rights list is fear: there is a perception in America that we are a frontier people. That we need to be able to defend ourselves against the bogeymen who are out to get us for unknown reasons. That a tyrannical government is always looking over our shoulders, prevented from seizing our civil liberties only by the thought of how much firepower we pack in our closets.

In the twenty-first century, however, simply having guns lying around the house has become a greater danger to the public safety than outdated ideas of oppressive governments or media accounts of armed robberies. The writers of our beloved Second Amendment did not forecast that the nation they created would have an unintentional gun rate for children under 14 nine times higher than the other 25 countries on the list combined. That guns in the home (including 43% of homes with children) are 22 times more likely to kill an acquaintance than an attacker. And that the risk of homicides would be five times greater and the risk of suicides three times greater in a household with guns. Thus, by buying a handgun, you dramatically increase your family members and friends’ risk of death. Our fear of crime is out of proportion to our actual vulnerability, but most of us don’t realize that the danger we put our family and friends in when we take steps to “protect” ourselves is much greater than the danger we face from the malicious, gun-toting bandits of media fame. The gun-rights activists fear tyranny, perhaps dating to the revolutionary use of arms.

However, their arguments do not hold up under scrutiny. It takes only a look at Chechnya and Iraq, which have possibly the highest gun-ownership rate in the world, to disprove this notion. We are a democracy: we have the ability to consign those politicians who would rob us of our civil rights to the darkest basement of history at the ballot box. And if we are too apathetic to exercise this essential freedom, perhaps we do not deserve the privileges we have grown so accustomed to. Finally, the NRA and its affiliates love to wail about undermining the Constitution. Let’s talk briefly about the Second Amendment. I’m no expert, but I can say that no gun control law, including outright handgun bans in Chicago and D.C., has been struck down by any court on Second Amendment grounds. The statistics cry out for action. America needs a national handgun ban, because as efforts in D.C. and Chicago have shown, piecemeal efforts in isolated cities will not work so long as surrounding areas allow easy access to these instruments of death.

Perhaps a national handgun ban would be something of a superficial solution, treating the pain while leaving the wound unhealed. But at least fewer innocents would be killed, while we exorcize the evil at the roots of gun violence.

We as Americans have moved past the paranoia and hatred of more troubled times. We value peace, we revere justice, and esteem a right to life over all else. None of these rights can be preserved in a world infested with readily available lethal weapons.

Restricting the sale of guns does not impinge upon our freedoms, it protects them. For when our children cannot go to school without fear of being shot by their classmates, no American can call herself truly free.

Click here to read “Gun Control: From My Cold, Dead Hands”