The United States Congress is seeking to ban a nationwide killer that results with on average 9 deaths a day, including 26% of the deaths of all 1-4 year olds. What is this catastrophic epidemic? Swimming pools.

Of course Congress is not debating any such legislation. Such a course of action would be too logical to ever make it in American politics. No, tax dollars go, instead, to regulating an item that comes after choking in the list of hazards to children’s health.

Gun control laws are not only unconstitutional, but the very proponents of gun control act based off of misinterpretation, naïveté, and disregard to the facts. We cannot trust our legislatures to defend our rights in the matter, but instead must actively defend ourselves from rampant regulation.

It is a favorite topic of the media to present gun control as a natural solution to overhyped childhood accidents. Of course, even one death, especially of a child, is too much, but the hypocrisy of these efforts is astonishing. Children are seven times more likely to drown than be shot, but lobbying dollars are sullied in attempts to deceive the public into thinking otherwise.

If certain legislators followed their logical arguments to conclusion, they’d find themselves regulating everything from how deep our pool water can be to how fast we chew. The natural next step would be to wrap ourselves in bubblewrap in yet another attempt to coddle the public.

But, of course, the ramifications of gun control are not contained to any age group. Homicides and other violent crimes are the real threat. Yet again, the results are either inconclusive or contrary to common held belief.

Gun control would be a convincing solution to growing urban crime rates if it were an effective means of curbing violence.

But it’s not.

While it’s true, the United Kingdom does hold a lower violent crime rate than the United States, the same cannot be said for other countries around the world with laws considerably more lax. But yet, countries such as Israel and Switzerland, who make gun licenses laughably easy to obtain, boast much lower murder rates.

The same is true not only abroad, but here in the United States. The thirty-one states that allow concealed firearms have, on average, twenty-four percent less violent crime, including nineteen percent fewer murders.

Guns by no means should be the lay of the land, this is true. But if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Rarely is law written as clearly as with the second amendment. The Bill of Rights was written with the sole concern of defending the natural rights of men, and the second amendment is no exception.

As time goes on, our rights are fewer in number, and each is more sacred for it. Our constitution, when followed, has not led us astray in 233 years, and it will not abandon this record unless we abandon it.