Mike Harris, an editor at the Veterans Today online journal, made the remarks in a phone interview with us on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, US President Barack Obama said the “biggest frustration” of his time in the office has been the inability to reduce unparalleled levels of gun violence in the country, indicating that he could launch an offensive to repeal the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.
“Guns are not the problem; guns have never been the problem. If President Obama acts unilaterally to infringe on the Second Amendment of the United States, there will be riots in the streets in this country,” Harris said.
“There are many good and law-abiding Americans who would no longer abide the law if he would try to take guns away from the good people,” he added.
He went on to say that gun violence is prevalent in the US because of the collapse of the mental health system and the use of drugs. “If you look at cities like Chicago, which has very very restricted gun laws, yet they're one of the most gun-violent places in the world.”
“The issue is not guns, the issue is drugs, and who has the ability of the right to sell drugs on every street corner in downtown Chicago, that’s why those people in Chicago are killing each others,” the veteran journalist noted.
“Really, it’s not so much of a gun issue, it’s more of a drugs issue, it’s more of a medical issue. Those are truly the issues that no one discusses because it’s no secret in this country,” he emphasized.
“But yet the gun problem is a huge problem because of the drugs. You have to understand [that] criminals don’t follow the law. They don’t care. The only people who would be penalized by overturning the second amendment would be the law-abiding Americans, who would be essentially left unarmed and harmless in the face of many of these violent criminals, who don’t follow the laws anyway,” Harris stated.
“So, any attempt to infringe [on] the Second Amendment would be grossly ineffective. It would create great, great, great public anger,” he warned.
Every year, more than 30,000 people are shot and killed in the United States.
The US averages 87 gun deaths each day as a function of gun violence, with an average of 183 injured, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the Centers for Disease Control.
The year 2012 was a record setting year for gun sales in the US.
About 4.5 million firearms are sold annually in the United States at a cost of 2 to 3 billion dollars.
On December 14, 2012, twenty children and six adult victims were fatally shot by a gunman -- who later killed himself -- at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in the town of Newtown in the US state of Connecticut. Earlier in the day, the assailant killed his mother in another location.
There have been reports that the twenty-year-old killer, Adam Lanza, suffered from a personality disorder, was on the antidepressant Prozac, and was fond of first-person shooter games.
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