A professor at the University of Texas at Austin feels that Americans just can’t handle owning guns.
In an op-ed for The Dallas Morning News, Prof. John Traphagan, who teaches religious studies and anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, demands that Americans give up gun ownership after several tragic, high-profile shootings that have taken place recently.
“In the past few years, Americans have witnessed shootings at a movie in Colorado, a 3-year-old shooting and killing his father in Indiana and, most recently, nine people killed in a fight among biker gangs in Waco,” Traphagan writes. “Amazingly, Americans seem to see these regular incidents as normal. It’s a powerful and sad testament to how anesthetized we have become to this ongoing violence.”
Throughout his opinion article, Traphagan continually raises the threat that gun ownership brings to American society. He moves from talking about gun violence to equating gun owners with domestic terrorists and couches them as a threat to civil society.
“There are many law-abiding American gun owners who do not go out and kill people and who keep their guns stored safely,” writes Traphagan. “But as a whole, Americans do not seem to be able to handle gun ownership in a way that permits maintenance of a civil society.”
Traphagan suggests that America become more like South Korea, Japan, and Australia and ban most forms of gun ownership. He calls for the federal government to confiscate illegal guns already in circulation among the public. He also wants more legislation on background checks, mandatory training for individuals with guns, and an outright ban on certain types of gun ownership.
“Americans should ask themselves whether they want to live in a society that is secure because everyone is ready to shoot one another or one that is secure because people have peace of mind and experience freedom from violence and the freedom to pursue their lives in safety and happiness rather than fear,” concludes Traphagan.
Throughout Traphagan’s opinion piece, he does not include any facts or statistics to strengthen his argument; perhaps that’s because the facts are not on his side.
According to a 2012 report from FactCheck.org, gun ownership has hit an all-time high while gun murders have reached their lowest levels since 1981, and both gun robberies and gun-aggravated assaults have sank to their lowest levels since 2004.
Traphagan’s flawed logic goes something like this: Americans own guns and are not responsible with them and kill people, so to prevent more deaths, let’s take away guns.
If that is truly the case, Traphagan should also want to ban car ownership, as vehicles have killed thousands more Americans than guns over the last 70 years.
With few facts, Traphagan’s article is based completely off of his liberal philosophy. According to Rate My Professor, some students who have taken Traphagan’s class claim he infuses those left-wing politics into his teaching. Some of his students called him “a total socialist,” “the worst professor ever” and an “idiot.”
