“It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision.” – Barbara Jordan

On Friday, March 23, Mia Freeman and Hayley Licata, survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, spoke to Shalhevet about their experiences during and after the school attack. Touched by the message of students and survivors like them, many are looking for ways to ensure that massacres of children do not happen again. Often, their solution is strict gun control.

In this debate, many advocates of gun control do not have logic and truth on their side so they compensate by employing emotion to gain the advantage. This obfuscates the real issues at hand and causes the debate to be led solely by anger and grief. There are places for emotion, but not when it comes at the expense of reason.

This was made clear just days after the Parkland shooting when two Stoneman Douglas students, Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, spoke on CNN denouncing pro-Second Amendment politicians. They claimed that if these politicians continue to accept “blood money” from the National Rifle Association then “they are against the children” and are “taking money from child murderers.”

Leaders of news media who favor gun control would not make these kinds of accusations themselves, so they instead use these children as a platform to appeal to the public’s emotional disposition.

And when people use logical arguments to debate these children’s radical political views, they risk being called callous and immoral because they “dare argue with a mass shooting survivor.” Being a mass shooting survivor only gives one the sick feeling of seeing death by gun and begs an opposing debater to be considerate and empathetic. But it does not automatically imbue one with knowledge of the Second Amendment, or guns and their value to society.

The sad reality is that the emotions aroused by the Parkland shooting are being used to abolish one of our most fundamental American freedoms, the right to bear arms.

Anti-gun campaigners will tell you that they don’t want to take away your guns, that they are pro- Second Amendment. But the lack of logic in the policies they are pushing proves otherwise.

They say the AR-15 (ArmaLite Rifle, not “assault rifle” or “automatic rifle”) is “too much gun,” claiming that there is no reason for any civilian to own one. In reality, it is an efficient and easy-to- use firearm that offers a significant and desperately needed advantage over an assailant.

They say that banning the AR-15 will eliminate or reduce violence. But doing so will only leave the common folk without the ability to effectively thwart an attacker, which defeats the exact purpose of the Second Amendment.

They also call AR-15’s “assault rifles” and “weapons of war”, basing these claims on the gun’s tactical look and cosmetic similarities to weapons of war. AR-15’s are actually the civilian version of the M16 assault rifle used by the U.S. armed forces. Note: civilian version. They have the same semi-automatic capabilities as those of civilian handguns and lack the rapid-fire machine gun qualities of fully automatic assault rifles, which have been highly regulated since 1934. The fully automatic military M16 has an effective rate of fire at 150 to 200 rounds per minute, compared to only 45 rpm for the semi-automatic AR-15.

On top of that, according to data from The Guardian, only 3.55 percent of gun homicides in America are from rifles—and the AR-15 is only a subset of those rifles.

And according to data I’ve extrapolated from the FBI and Mother Jones, mass shootings only account for about 0.4 percent of firearm homicides, and rifles, let alone “assault rifles”, are only a small percentage of those mass shooting deaths. If the goal is to reduce firearm deaths, it won’t be accomplished through arbitrary bannings of guns like the AR-15.

The push to ban a weapon that only amounts to a tiny percentage of gun deaths can only be explained by the fact that its supporters really believe all firearms should be banned. They know that they would never get a ban all at once, so they work toward it one small legislative measure at a time. Banning assault weapons like the AR-15 is merely a symbolic ploy meant to accustom the people to the eventual confiscation of all their firearms.

The issue of gun violence is real. There are too many deaths. But it is an extremely complicated topic and can only be addressed once gun haters end their exploitation of feelings and misinformation to push radical policy.

These partisans must stop clouding their emotional argument under a veil of artificial logic and presenting it as reasonable. Emotion has appropriate applications, and in this debate, sensitivity to the victims of such violence must be paramount. But policy must always be founded in sound logic and reason. Only then we will be able to come together as a nation and create a safer America for all.