Closing US borders to Syrian refugees won't make Americans safer — gun control will

Donald Trump was elected off the back of his supposed tough guy bravado and self-proclaimed alpha male status. Throughout the campaign, and even on inauguration day, Trump painted us a masterpiece portrayal of a besieged America living under constant threat.

Against all odds, voters bought into that. People rallied behind the former reality TV star as a bastion of airtight national security – and just a few days into his premiership, it appears The Donald is doing his damnedest to deliver on his ambiguous and protectionist campaign platform.

Over the course of the last 48 hours, Trump has unleashed a hellstorm of executive orders allegedly designed to ensure the safety of ordinary Americans. How, you ask?

By indefinitely barring Syrian refugees from setting foot on US soil, suspending visas from anyone coming to America from "high-risk" countries, and finally making good on his promise to erect a "beautiful" border wall that will protect innocent Americans from those pesky Mexican rapists we keep hearing about.

What a wonderful world it would be if those non-existent Mexican deviants were the top national security threat America now faces, and a gaggle of half-baked executive orders could seamlessly remove all trace of that threat.

But the long and short of it is, the greatest safety issue in our country rests its head a whole lot closer to home than a drug den in Tijuana – and the solution is a tad bit more complicated.

Let's talk about gun crime.

We're just 25 days into 2017, and already 993 Americans have been shot dead on home soil by their lunatic neighbours. As a point of reference, that's about 40 Americans a day. Hell, in the last 72 hours alone, 96 people have been gunned down by their fellow citizens. It's happening everywhere, too. Movie theatres, nightclubs, churches, mosques, shopping malls, community centers, schools – not one spot in this country has been left untainted by gun crime. And it's Americans who are pulling the triggers, here.

How many US citizens have been killed by the so-called Islamic State this month? Zero. How many Syrian refugees have gunned down an American soccer mom in the past 30 days? Zero. Stack that up against 1,000 cold blooded murders committed on American soil, by Americans with legally-purchased firearms, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which national security threat has got to take precedence.

Spitting on Iraqi orphans and erecting a giant wall nobody wants to pay for won't magically wipe away this life-or-death game of Russian roulette Americans are forced to play every single day just by leaving their beds. And so if Trump truly cared about our safety, he would tear open difficult new dialogues to pursue urgent gun control measures.

Instead, America's freshly-anointed president refuses to acknowledge that acts of gun-fuelled, domestic mass murder are even an issue. Instead, he's vowed to abolish gun-free zones in schools, axe his predecessor's executive orders on tougher background checks for criminals, and pledged to expand so-called second amendment rights. In Trump's twisted reality of autocracy and hyper-conservatism, guns are nothing to worry about.

A lot of that denial probably stems from the fact that America's all-powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) spent millions of dollars to install Trump in the Oval Office. Some of it just comes from lack of caring. After all, America's new president is far more interested in fulfilling dopey campaign promises and proving poll numbers don't exist.

Yesterday, 13 Americans were needlessly murdered by fellow citizens as a direct result of their country's inconceivably lax gun control measures. And if voters continue to sit idly by and allow Donald Trump to sell them an overpriced wall under the guise of national security, those daily murders will just keep on coming. If Americans don't stand up and demand their new president to take on the issues that really matter, things are only going to get worse.