Never Ending Tragedy
Never Ending Tragedy
Gun violence doesn't need to be rampant in America. All we need is sensible change.
I was planning a different article for today, but it happened again—another school shooting. More young, innocent children were taken from their families far too soon. Sadly, it's just another day in America.
This news is heartbreaking for everyone. As a parent with a child in elementary school and two more who will be at that point in the future, it is devastating.
The constant wonder of if your child will be in danger. Will they be hurt or killed? Will they survive something they must process and live with for their whole lives? Their innocence of being a child wiped away in an instant?
The stats are always worse than years before. Politicians are all talk and no change. And our court system keeps loosening laws instead of strengthening them.
Then, a tragedy like this happens, and it reminds me. It needs to be repeated. It needs to be discussed day in and day out. It needs to be drilled into the heads of everyone who thinks their right to buy and carry around an unregistered weapon of war is more important than the lives of children.
There have already been 129 mass shootings in America this year. That is over one per day.
There is more than one mass shooting every single day in our country.
Over 6000 people have been killed by guns so far this year. That averages out to 70 people every day. This number doesn’t reflect all of the people who were injured or who witnessed gun violence and have to deal with the ongoing trauma of those events.
But here is where the conversation already begins to break down. It isn’t that gun advocates won’t acknowledge those stats. It is that they will try to discredit their meaning.
First will be “Well what defines a mass shooting, I think the number is less.” If that is your entry into the conversation, you’ve already lost. Because the point isn’t what constitutes a mass shooting, it is that there is an endless number of shootings.
The same goes for the number of people killed. They will quickly debate how many are suicides, how many are from gang violence, and any other way they can hope to bring down the “true” number.
This isn’t an empty stat. These are people dying. Breaking the stat down doesn’t make a difference because all of the deaths are tragic, and they are numbers that are unheard of outside of corrupt countries overrun with drug cartels.
The next argument made is that if you outlaw guns, then only outlaws will have guns. This is to suggest that stronger gun laws won’t stop crime. It will only make it harder for the “good guys with guns” to prevent crime.
Yet this argument is immediately defeated by looking at which states have the strongest and weakest gun laws. Unsurprisingly, the states with stricter laws have significantly lower gun death and violence rates than those with weak laws.
Massachusetts leads the nation with the lowest gun death rate of 3.54 deaths per 100,000 people. At the other end of the chart is Mississippi, with 32.61 gun deaths per 100,000, a rate almost ten times higher.
This is why many are championing the Massachusetts gun law system and want it applied nationally.
Let’s look at how Massachusetts approaches guns.
A person must take a firearms safety course to get a license, which is required to purchase a gun. New residents to the state must wait 60 days to apply for a license.
There is an additional permit to carry a firearm.
Guns are required to be stored safely at home with tamper-resistant locks. Guns must also be unloaded and secure during transport whenever they are not in direct control of the individual.
Any firearm ownership transfer must be reported to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.
A background check is required on all firearm purchases, including at gun shows. This check looks up the buyer's gun license and checks with the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services.
Magazine size is limited to 10 rounds. There is an exemption for magazines created before 1995.
Firearms are subject to a double-banned features system. There is a list of banned features, and any weapon with two or more of these features is illegal.
Judges are allowed to order a temporary confiscation of a person’s firearms if they are at risk of harming themselves or others.
Towns may have additional restrictions.
These are sensible rules that don’t infringe the Second Amendment and, most importantly, that have been shown to be effective in reducing gun violence. If there was a will to do so, they could all be applied at a national level and could be applied quickly.
Proponents of the Second Amendment should support these measures, and polls show that most do.
But for those who don’t, it is worth thinking about the fact that eventually, gun violence will have affected enough of the population that the tide will turn. The Second Amendment itself will be the entire focus. Any amendment can be changed or repealed completely with enough support and outrage.
Gun Culture
Another factor that must change in this country is our culture around guns.
Firearms are serious weapons, and they must be respected.
Unfortunately, we have a culture that worships guns. We have people who like to pull them out at parties and wave them around or post pictures online, aiming their guns or lining up their collections on their beds—all efforts to appear cool or tough.
There is nothing impressive about owning a firearm. Our country has a population of 330 million people, but we have over 400 million guns. It isn’t hard to get one. And it isn’t hard to shoot one, either. Firearms were made to make it easier to arm a fighting force.
Hand-to-hand combat requires strength and skill, archery requires years of training, and guns require mere minutes to teach someone how to load, arm, and aim. Yet guns are so simple and powerful that America held off the most powerful military in the world with farmers, blacksmiths, and adolescents.
Even a young child can shoot a gun effectively, and unfortunately, as we’ve seen in the news, they do so with deadly results.
Politicians, in their attempt to woo their gun-loving constituents, only make it worse. The number of political ads where a member of Congress is holding an assault rifle, shooting targets, or even blowing things up is all too common.
That’s not to say there is anything wrong with owning a gun responsibly. However, responsible owners don’t show off or treat their weapons as toys. They follow the laws, and they treat guns with care and respect.
An additional way responsible gun owners can help is to call out those who are irresponsible with their weapons. It will mean more coming from fellow gun owners than from non-owners.
Gun advocates love suggesting that the solution to our violence is to arm everyone, including teachers and janitors.
But more guns are not the solution. Gangs, cartels, and criminals aren’t manufacturing guns. Over time, legal guns make their way into illegal hands through a variety of ways, such as transfers and theft.
The fewer guns a nation has, the fewer guns that criminals have access to. The fewer guns made, the fewer there are in the world.
There is also research that shows having a school full of armed teachers can make students who have violent tendencies more likely to get a gun and shoot others.
It may seem counterintuitive, but those who want to shoot others out of anger or spite aren’t thinking logically. They see the guns and feel challenged to pull their plan off. They think about how tougher and badass they would be, not to back away from those guns but to go headfirst at them.
European countries have researched these issues after having some school shootings of their own. They found having programs where teachers and parents are taught the signs to look for to spot students who may be developing violent tendencies is far more effective than having guns on school grounds for defense.
Both Switzerland and Germany have invested in psychologists in schools and have them be assigned to students who are identified as being at risk of violence. A measure we could easily replicate here in America.
It is time for sensible reform at a national level.
Straightforward, logical gun laws will reduce the violence and death in this county.
Training teachers not in how to handle firearms but in how to spot children who need help before they become another school shooter.
How many more people have to die?
How many more innocent children need to have their lives cut tragically short?
It is time to force our leaders to take action or for us to remove them from office through the ballot box.