Is Gun Control The Solution In America?

Since '99 there have been 404 school shootings in America. Thats an average of 16 every year.

It seems like every topic I talk about is a controversial one. Well, this one is no different, and maybe I’ll lose people in my life over these opinions. I think it’s important to have discourse on these kinds of important topics, especially when this affects our entire country. So, let’s dive into this one.

April 20, 1999, is a day that will go down in infamy for all the wrong reasons. Two high school boys shot up their high school and killed 13 people, 12 students and one teacher. They took their own lives immediately after. This sparked a nationwide debate about gun policies and implementing more laws into place. 25 years later this problem has not slowed down one bit. In ’99 this was the deadliest school shooting ever in America. It has now been surpassed twice.

Since ‘99, there have been a staggering 404 school shootings in America. On average that’s 16 per year. The crazy thing about this is that we’re only accounting for specifically school shootings. If we were to include all shootings, we’d be in the thousands and maybe even the tens of thousands.

So, what are some solutions? Well, gun control isn’t as bad as a lot of people think. I know people like to say that the states with the strictest gun laws still have a lot of gun violence. The states with the strictest laws are all Democrat, while the states with the least gun laws are Republican. Let’s take a deep dive into the statistics for these crimes. According to an article by Caitlin Owens on axios.com, Saint Louis, Missouri, Birmingham, Alabama, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Jackson Mississippi are the four cities with the highest gun deaths per capita in 2022. These are all in red states.

One way of gun control is implementing stricter background checks when purchasing guns. I see people argue this and I genuinely don’t understand the arguments. Most people will pass the background fairly quickly. I could understand people who have a history of crimes being upset about this because well they wouldn’t be able to purchase guns. Some people have mental health problems. Depending on the severity of that should determine if they are capable of owning a weapon. Almost every school shooter has tried getting away with their crimes by trying to go by way of insanity, claiming they have mental health problems. So, I think it’s good to look into that history as well. Ultimately, I think more thorough background checks will help and this would not take longer for people who have clean histories. However, it will prevent them from getting weapons in the hands of a lot of the wrong people.

Which brings me to my next point. Another argument I hear all the time is that criminals would get a hold of weapons anyway. Though we aren’t trying to get rid of guns at all. All we’d be doing is making it harder for bad guys to get guns the legal way. There is this notion that Republicans think the Democratic party wants to take away all guns from everyone. That cannot be further from the truth. The majority of Democrats I know own guns and are big on the Second Amendment. Also, this argument that people say, “the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”, is such a bad argument. I’m sure everyone has heard of the Uvalde school shooting that happened on May 24, 2022. The 18-year-old shot and killed 21 total people, 19 students and two teachers. There were nearly FOUR HUNDRED “good guy” cops at the scene for over an hour and did not enter the building. That many cops with only one suspect and they were scared to enter the building. So that argument doesn’t hold any weight when shootings continue to happen no matter how many “good guys” have weapons.

The main thing I would do is ban or restrict the purchases of semi-automatic rifles in the U.S. These types of weapons were made for the military and there is no justifiable reason why everyday civilians would need to use a semi-auto weapon. Even for hunting animals, people don’t need to use a weapon that sprays multiple bullets per second. A good example of banning semi-auto weapons is Australia. In 1996 they had a mass shooting there that took out over 30 people with a semi-auto rifle. The entire country agreed to ban assault weapons and they haven’t had a mass shooting since then.

So, it is possible to achieve that goal. The goal just becomes a lot harder to achieve with a country like America that can’t live without its weapons. Of all the top ten countries with the most weapons, America has more than the rest of the top ten COMBINED. We are the only country in the world that has more weapons than we do people living here.

I have also heard many people say, “Our founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment for a reason and to give us the freedom to have the weapons we want”. While that’s true, the Constitution was created over 200 years ago and during that time they were using muskets and flintlock pistols. Those guns couldn’t kill over a hundred people in less than a minute like the ones today can.

Gun control has proven to work in many places and who knows if we will ever even see that kind of progress here in America. What I do know is that I am sick and tired of hearing “thoughts and prayers” after every shooting from our people in power. Evidently, the thoughts and prayers have not worked at all and maybe we should take real action in trying to solve these problems. There is no reason why our children should be going to school worried if they will even make it back alive. The fact every school has drills that they do in case of a school shooting sickens me and should embarrass all of America. Schools should be safe places where children go to learn and socialize. Not a freaking warzone. Let me know if you guys agree or disagree with gun control and why down below!