Should US citizens accused of domestic abuse lose the right to bear arms?

Yes

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by Aldo Bonincontro

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The social drama of domestic abuses is revealing all its wide diffusion in all the Countries of the world and of, course, in the US that must always to face a high and endemic violence level in their society, too charged of stress and relation problems among individuals. This violence is frequently performed by fathers on their partners and children, by mothers, equally, on their children and also from adult sons, mainly male, on their old parents to obtain from them money, for example, to buy abuse drugs or to pay their gambling losses.

So, when certain subjects are charged or, on the more reason, have already been condemned in the past for violence in their family or outside it, I personally consider absurd allowing such guys the right to own a gun or a rifle. This would mean giving them a real licence to kill, able to multiply the violent and criminal potential of these persons, to make more worrying and dangerous their threats and the likelihood they can wound or kill one or more components of their own family.

The average American citizens should understand better than me that the offensive potential of a rifle or a gun is higher than that of a knife or a club; the last two need a contact between two persons, while a firearm can hit and kill at a long distance and also a much higher number of persons.

The possess of a firearm should be limited as much as possible, as made in many other Countries where the crime rates are much lower than in US and allowed only with a license (after a careful exam on the subject) given people without any criminal record and psychologically recognized not easy to violent behaviour or addicted to drugs and alcohol.
This wouldn't reduce murders in family or along the streets to zero, but could lower much their frequency, at least, to the levels of many other Countries like mine (I'm not American).

So, rifles and guns shouldn't be anymore on sale even in supermarkets, as clearly shown by the great Michael Moore, in one of his most successful documentary movies, "Bowling for Columbine" (2002), as it's possible in the US.
Here, a violent or psychopathic father, husband or son can create an arsenal in his house with the pretext of keeping it safe or being a pacific collector, but his real intentions are keeping a heavy rule on his family.

All violent persons who own a weapon profit of it to increase their violent and arrogant power on the persons around them, thinking it would be easier to be respected, obeyed, or simply considered. Most of them think to be capable of limiting themselves, they don't want to kill, but only to use the weapon for self-defence; instead, they are unaware of joking with the fire in a gunpowder magazine, so that only one moment of rage, more violent than usual, can drive them to shoot and cause a tragedy.
More than the security of their house against external intrusions, they have in mind how to keep their patriarchal "male power" on their family.

It will not be easy, also within the next generation, to impose severe limitations to firearms possess in the US and make end, at last, such Far-West reality in this Country that should be one of the most civilized and advanced of the world.
The weapons culture is too rooted like an addiction and, without a gun in their pocket anymore, too many people would feel themselves "naked" or prey of an "abstinence crisis".

The first thing to do in this direction should be just this: preventing people who's charged or already condemned for domestic abuse of whatever kind to own a firearm and extend this prohibition to all people charged or condemned of violent actions also outside their families (robbing, drug smuggling, brawl, sexual violence or harassment, terrorism, threatens, alcohol and drugs use, resistance to the police and so on) because their violent attitude can very easily hit in their familiar nucleus too.

All these subjects are not "ghosts"; their data are recorded in all the data-base of the police in all American States. So, if you were in this list, you wouldn't get the licence or qualification to buy a weapon in a shop; if you entered this list for a crime, you would automatically lose it and all your weapons would be sequestered.

Every weapon dealer should record all his sales in a protected electronic memory with the number codes of the clients' licences and their identity, so that the police can easily control whether some weapons have been sold to persons without qualification and arrest this dealer in case of transgression.

Also the number of shops where to buy firearms would be drastically reduced (surely, not in supermarkets or mega-stores) to ease such type of controls and repression, as well as the weapons types in commerce, banning all automatic rifles and machine-guns.
It's not possible that a normal citizen can buy weapons used by the Army or by the Special Corps!

After this most urgent step, it will be possible to limit weapons possess also among the so-called "good persons", without vices and penal records, given that also these subjects can sometimes "explode" and make a carnage in their own families.
Also in many apparently normal families, in fact, these tragedies are possible and they really occur. These are the final acts after years of physical and psychological abuses or increasing stress on one of their members and, too frequently, these situations had been ignored or underrated before.

Don't forget that the presence of one or more firearms at home also encourages a violent and fatal reaction by the victims of long-lasting violence against the abuser, as soon as these victims reach in getting only one of their father's or husband's firearms or simply in buying another one. Violence calls violence and a "weapons rush" inside a family can only lead to a "final battle".

After the tragedy, a judge can, sometimes, admit the extenuating circumstances (partial or total) of the self-defence, but the flying bullets in a family or among neighbours, in any case, are tragedies that should be avoided at any cost, in a really civil society.

This is possible only with a capillary preventive policy by the US authorities, not with that of "weapons for everybody, everybody more protected" that can only multiply these tragedies.

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