Can We Stop Pretending Freedom and Safety Are Enemies?

On the false choice between preserving liberty and preventing tragedy.

We live in a country where it’s apparently controversial to say two things can be true at the same time: That we want fewer people to die from gun violence—and that the Second Amendment matters.

Let’s cut to it: every time there’s a mass shooting, a tragic suicide, or another headline involving a firearm, we follow a ritual. Mourning. Thoughts. Prayers. Outrage. Hashtags. Op-eds. And eventually, legislation—usually well-meaning, occasionally useful, often cosmetic.

Here in Oregon, we are on the last step in that cycle. If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed we have two bills coming up for a committee vote this week—HB 3075 and HB 3076. These bills aim to make gun ownership more… curated. Permits. Fingerprinting. Magazine limits. Dealer inspections. Like turning the Second Amendment into a trip to the DMV.

And sure, on paper, some of it sounds reasonable. Who wants unstable people to have guns? But here’s the part that never quite makes it into the official talking points: the people misusing guns aren’t just a bureaucratic oversight. They’re the byproduct of a culture that’s quietly losing its mind.

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When the Problem Isn’t the Trigger—It’s the Person Behind It

If firearms made suicide more likely, Japan wouldn’t have a higher suicide rate than we do. If gun ownership automatically created carnage, Switzerland would look like the finale of a Quentin Tarantino film. But it doesn’t. Because this isn’t about the tool—it’s about the mind of the person holding it.

More than half of gun deaths in America are suicides. That’s not an argument against gun rights—it’s a red siren warning that we are failing at mental health, at community, at building a culture where people feel like life is still worth living. You don’t fix that with a new licensing requirement. You fix it by giving people purpose, belonging, and help when they need it—not six months later on a waitlist.

If you’ve lost someone to suicide, none of this is abstract. It’s agony. And that’s exactly why we have to get the solution right.

This is, in many ways, a disagreement between two schools of thought—like two doctors reviewing the same patient chart but offering different treatments. One says, “Here’s a prescription for tighter controls, more regulations, a little legal cauterization.” The other looks at the same data and says, “You’re treating symptoms. The underlying condition is untreated despair, cultural collapse, and a total breakdown in community care.” Both sides want the patient to live. They just disagree on how.

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Founding Fathers Didn’t Write the Second Amendment for Duck Season

It’s popular to say the Second Amendment is outdated, written for an era of muskets and militias. And in a literal sense, sure—it was 1791. But the Founders weren’t just worried about hunting rights or home defense. They were worried about power. Specifically, what happens when too much of it concentrates in government hands.

To them, the right to bear arms was a check against tyranny, not a hunting license. James Madison argued that an armed citizenry was the best defense against both domestic usurpers and foreign invaders. The “militia” wasn’t a professional standing army—it was everyone. The assumption wasn’t that the government would always be evil. It was that it might someday forget it worked for the people.

As Thomas Jefferson put it: “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

That context doesn’t go out of style just because we now have background checks and biometric safes.

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Common Sense, Now with Fingerprinting and a Filing Fee

HB 3075 and HB 3076 aim at the right question—how do we keep guns away from people who shouldn’t have them?—but answer it with the usual playbook: more process, more fees, more delays. It’s “do something” politics dressed up as reform. And for what? To stop the next tragedy committed by someone who was never going to follow the law in the first place?

Meanwhile, who actually jumps through these hoops? Regular people. Farmers. Single moms. Retired cops. People in neighborhoods where 911 is more of a hope than a guarantee. They’ll take the class, pay the fee, wait the weeks. And if they need protection before the permit arrives? Too bad. Government’s working on it.

Let’s not pretend this isn’t a barrier. If the state required a permit and fingerprinting to exercise your right to free speech, it would be called censorship. When we do it to the Second Amendment, it gets a friendlier name—“common sense.”

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Switzerland, Japan, and the Greatest Hits of Lazy Comparisons

Every time gun control comes up, someone inevitably points to Europe—usually Switzerland if they’re being honest, and the U.K. if they’re not. Switzerland has widespread gun ownership and a murder rate that’s practically fictional. Japan bans guns and has a nearly nonexistent homicide rate... yet a suicide rate that overshadows ours.

Different cultures, different problems. What they have that we increasingly don’t is social cohesion, strong families, and a sense of shared values. When those break down—and they’re breaking down here—we get violence, whether the tool is a gun, a fist, or a bottle of fentanyl.

In America, we don’t just have a policy gap. We have a meaning gap. And the people falling into that hole don’t care whether their magazine is capped at ten rounds.

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We’re Not in a Gun Crisis. We’re in a Meaning Crisis.

The hard truth is that gun violence—especially suicide—is often the last act of a story that started long before anyone pulled a trigger. Addiction. Isolation. Depression. It’s easier to regulate guns than it is to confront what we’ve allowed to fester in our communities.

We’ve replaced community with apps, worship with algorithms, and meaning with distraction. And now we’re surprised that people are angry, lost, and reaching for weapons?

Until we get serious about fixing that—about investing in mental health care that actually works, restoring civil society, and maybe even reminding people that family, faith, and belonging matter—we’re just rearranging furniture on a burning porch.

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What Actually Works, But Probably Won’t Trend on Twitter

We enforce the laws we have. We make sure background checks are actually informed by relevant data—mental health records, restraining orders, violent crime convictions. We promote safe storage, support red-flag laws with real due process, and improve access to treatment before someone becomes a threat.

But we don’t punish the innocent to constrain the guilty. We don’t turn a constitutional right into a permission slip. And we don’t pretend that a slightly more complicated gun purchase is going to fix what’s coming apart at the seams.

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Final Thought: Don’t Mistake Motion for Progress

Yes, gun deaths are horrific. Yes, suicides are tragic. Yes, mass shootings are a moral and civic abomination. But if your solution begins and ends with “let’s make legal gun ownership harder,” then you’re treating a broken arm with a Band-Aid and wondering why it still hurts.

The real work ahead isn’t choosing between liberty and safety. It’s refusing the false choice—and fighting for both. We can mourn tragedy without handing our liberties over to bureaucratic optimism. We can pass laws—but if we won’t rebuild the culture that made those laws unnecessary in the first place, we’re just kicking the can. Again.

Oregon doesn’t need a new ritual. It needs real work. And that starts with seeing guns not as the disease, but as the tool we’ve scapegoated while the house burns down behind us.