The Atlanta-area shootings that happened on March 16 left me in shock. It felt too real for me. Six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent, and four of them were Korean. All I could think of was my family and my community back home.
I am a second generation Korean American, born and raised in the South. I currently reside in the Twin Cities. My parents immigrated in the 1980s from South Korea. I grew up in a community with many Asian immigrants, specifically Korean immigrants and children of Korean immigrants like me.
Because of my Korean connection and experience, I can see quite clearly the impacts of gun violence and the obvious first steps for us to take to reduce gun violence.
In 2016, South Korea only had five gun homicides. Per 100,000 people, that number is 0.00005, an extremely small number. On the other hand, the U.S. reported 4.1 gun homicides per 100,000 people. Gun homicides are only a small piece, but this paints a grim picture of the problem of gun violence.
Yes, South Korea is a much smaller country. Yes, the number of firearms they have is significantly lower than the U.S. However, South Korea actually had frequent gun homicides before extensive gun regulations.
1970s regulations proved effective
After the Korean War, civilian gun violence was quite prevalent throughout the country. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they passed strict gun regulations and state-led gun confiscations. These regulations proved to be effective as gun violence began to decrease. Now, it’s extremely rare to hear about any gun violence.
[image_caption]Eric Ryu[/image_caption]
Growing up, I was only allowed to watch one show during the weekdays: the local evening news. It was not exciting, but it was my one chance to watch TV. While watching the news, I noticed how often I saw reports on gun violence.
I still have family in South Korea, so I’ve been back to South Korea with my family quite often. Whenever I was in South Korea and watched the news, I rarely ever saw any reports on gun violence. I wondered how South Korea had little to no gun violence.
South Korea has extremely strict gun regulations. Private guns for hunting or target practice must be stored and registered at local police stations.
All gun owners receive and regularly renew gun permits. These permits require extensive background checks. To receive and renew a permit, a prospective gun owner must provide documents to prove legitimate reasons for gun ownership and physical and psychiatric assessments.
Small changes could save lives
Is it possible to follow a similar model here to South Korea’s gun regulations? I believe so, and we should. I don’t expect anything as strict as South Korea because I want to think realistically. As much as I would like big, immediate changes, I know that is not feasible. Baby steps are a win for us. They could have saved a handful of lives, like the Asian women from the Atlanta-area shootings.
So let’s pass safe-gun-storage laws to prevent unauthorized users from accessing and using firearms, which can reduce suicides and accidental gun deaths.
Gun owners should have the right to keep their firearms at home. But when they are not in use, they should be unloaded and locked at home when not in use. When owners buy firearms from dealer sales AND private sales, locks must accompany the sales.
Another way is passing universal background checks to close the loopholes in federal gun laws. Unlicensed sellers must be made to perform background checks before selling firearms. These universal background checks would prevent those who have been convicted of violent crimes and those who are ineligible due to mental health reasons to purchase any firearms.
Yes, I acknowledge that we Americans hate seeing these comparisons, but there is so much we can learn from South Korea. The numbers show it.
I’ve stayed silent for way too long and have grown to become numb to gun violence. The impact of the Atlanta-area shootings felt too real as all I could think about were my family, friends, and the AAPI community. Now it’s time for me to take action and to use what I’ve learned. It hurts to see that many of these shootings could have been prevented. There is no simple solution, but we can start with safe-storage laws and universal background checks.
Eric Ryu is a Korean American immigration attorney and a graduate student currently pursuing a master of human rights degree at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. He grew up in Dallas, Texas, and currently lives in Minneapolis.
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Sorry Eric, this will never work, we got the gun crazies in charge of the gun laws here, and you can’t teach them anything about gun control, or saving lives, they believe and are afraid of the boogie man and there is a boogieman behind every door, tree, bush, nightstand, fence and corner. Their only solution to gun violence is more gun violence. The favorite mantra is, only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, the ludicrous of that statement is, every bad guy with a gun starts as a good guy with a gun!
Younger people like the author need to keep their children and grandchildren safer than we have done for our children and grandchildren. There is a long list of things people said would never happen that did.
We need to define irresponsible gun behavior and crack down on it. One example is keeping a loaded, unlocked gun in your nightstand, purse or glovebox. Another is giving or selling a gun to a felon. Still another is someone under the legal age having a gun. Depending on what happens, you lose the gun, lose your gun rights or get arrested and charged. Gun owners should be required to have gun insurance, which covers both their theft and any crimes they are used to commit.
You earn the right to call yourself a responsible gun owner only if you act like one. One part of that is not defending the irresponsible. Just think of them as poachers compared to hunters.
I have lived in South Korea twice for a year each time. Once just after the Korean War in 1959, and the other time in 1968 in the army stationed by the DMZ. Both times, I was very impressed with how the Koreans managed to overcome huge problems with serious and well organized efforts. Sometimes the methods were very harsh, but it didn’t take long for everyone to get the message: “This is what is going to happen, or else”. Unfortunately, we have a more difficult time getting on the same page, or even even being in the same book.
Well, sure. A serious democracy populated with responsible citizens and not hamstrung by (willful) misinterpretations of a sclerotic constitution adopted in the 18th Century CAN suppress modern gun violence. The author notes that S Korea accomplished this via “strict gun regulations and state-led gun confiscation”. In other words, the ocean of firearms in post-war Korea was wrung out of the society by responsible adults in a nation that could fashion a consensus and legally enforce it.
In 21st Century America, none of those conditions obtain. We are awash in a tsunami of high powered weaponry, with millions of gun fetishists apparently owning dozens of guns each. Not only can we not pass “strict” regulations, we can’t pass weak ones, no matter how many gun massacres occur. Worse, we now have a democratically-illegitimate “conservative” super-majority on the Supreme Court, which has already created a manufactured “right” of “law abiding citizens” to own a “personal protection” handgun under the archaic 2nd Amendment, and is now poised to extend that to a right to have the entire country look like a 19th Century Old West main street, an era that gun fetishists openly emulate as a Golden Era of “sensible” gun violence. Of course, as Mr Wade says, every citizen is “law abiding” until they choose not to be, for whatever reason that might come into their head.
At this point, talk about “what we can do” is essentially idle. On the issue of gun violence, the body politic isn’t just numb, it’s already a corpse! Until there is a massive sea change in the nation’s attitude toward guns, gun worship and (phony) gun “rights”, basically on the order of what was accomplished with drunk driving, we’ll continue to watch the out of control gun mayhem (as enabled by the “conservative” movement and Repub party) get worse and worse every year/decade, whatever. Sorry, kids, but this is another national crisis foisted upon us by the “conservative” movement.
Recent reason’s for gun rights:
Need to carry a gun in order to shoot & kill 6 year old in the back from road rage incident
Need to have a gun stuffed in the sofa so the 4 year old can shoot the 2 year old
Need to have a gun in the night stand so the 4 year old can shoot you and the wife because you are too drugged up to pay attention to him.
Need to have a gun so you can shoot & kill 6 year olds coming home from McDonald’s
Need to carry a gun so you can drop 10 year old while jumping on a trampoline.
Evidently kids don’t rank high on the gun owners 2nd amendment craziness, no number of deaths and blood shed is too high to shake their love of guns! The greater the death toll the higher the resolve.
Well, Dennis, in the immortal (and immoral) words of rightwing extremist and minor “conservative” celebrity, Joe the Plumber: “Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights”…to own guns, naturally.
Ah yes its the King Wayne LaPierre version of the bible, “and on the 8th day god created all kinds of fire arms so man could destroy his creation!”
That ship has already sailed in this country.
Eric, will the government use no knock warrants when confiscating guns?
Looking forward to your insightful suggestions of alternatives to what Eric has suggested…