If recent events aren’t enough to spark change in gun reform, I don’t know what will be. Even in Northern California, we cannot escape the terror caused by guns. On Oct. 23, a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed in Santa Rosa by police, who thought he was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. It was really just a BB gun that looked like an assault rifle.
The tragedy in this is that police had to shoot the kid. Letting someone holding an AK-47 in a public area is not a risk the cops can take, regardless of who the person is. This is just a sign of the times in relation to gun safety.
Last week, Los Angeles International Airport was the scene of another shooting rampage–a man shot at TSA agents and killed one. According to USA Today, he was angry about government oppression of civil rights as well as taking guns away from civilians. The irony is that the TSA will only crack down harder now, and the tragedy which he inflicted will only make people think harder about gun reform.
According to a report by Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University, firearms cause 31,000 deaths per year in the United States. But zero Americans are saved every year by invaders on American soil by firearm-toting citizens.
This is just the most recent and close to home in a long line of tragedies. Last year in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, a disturbed man walked into an elementary school, shooting and killing 26 young children and six teachers, who tried to protect them. This was the second largest mass shooting by an American, behind the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007.
This list of these attacks go on in recent history, including the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting. Every single one was tragic, but preventable.
We need to find legal ways to regulate the gun industry to make Americans more safe, and now is the time.
When the Second Amendment was written in 1789, we were just emerging from the Revolutionary War, where the fighting occurred in the towns of America. For our nation, it was not a safe time, with red coats attacking at any moment, so the government felt it was a necessity for civilians to have a means of defense for their lives.
Today, there is no army invading Marin County or any other place in the United States, so why should it be legal to possess a gun? The only means of defense we need now are regulations so we can escape the terror caused by guns which are used by Americans, on Americans.
Let us also take into consideration the types of firearms that were in use in 1789 compared to 2013. In the Revolutionary War, the two armies lined up face to face with each other and fired incredibly inaccurate muskets at each other. They barely had the power to kill someone on impact and sprayed bullets everywhere. Today, automatic assault rifles are available for purchase, allowing anyone to easily kill many of people in a short period of time. If one person had an automatic assault rifle in the Revolutionary War, he or she could almost have single-handedly won a small battle.
Siegel wrote as the conclusion to his report, “We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. Although we could not determine the causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had a disproportionally large number of deaths from firearm-related homicides.”
Guns do more harm than good in our country, and it is beyond me that in the face of attacks on innocent children, our government has done little to prevent the violence that guns inflict on people every day.
While you can argue that even without guns, gangs will continue to fight and violent crime will still be committed, and that is true. However, something needs to be done to protect gun violence victims and to protect us all from heartbreaking tragedy.
