When you have a generation who has been raised reading books like “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games,” with teenagers, boys and girls alike, as the knights in shining armor, saving the adults, it should come as no surprise that when Congress screws us on gun control, letting another 17 students die, we, the (young) people, are going to fight back.
How much has Congress screwed us with this? Well, simply type into Google, statistics on Mass shootings since 2012, click the New York Times link that says “After Sandy Hook, More than 400 People Have Been Shot in Over 200 School Shootings”, and see for yourself.
Done? Note that this is six years after someone took a gun to 20 children- children defined as 12 and under. In that time there have been 239 school shootings, 438 shot and 138 killed.
That’s how many times Congress has failed us, 438 times. And that’s just the people who are in schools. We are not counting the mass shootings in Vegas, or Orlando, or before 2012 with Virginia Tech and Columbine.
The “young people”, the millennials, Generation Z, of this country are sick and tired of people walking in with semi-automatic weapons, rifles and handguns and shooting up our schools like some sadistic form of “Call of Duty.” and who’s going to blame them, the shooters, the older generations? We are living in a world where teens are taking on the dark forces of evil becomes a reality that couldn’t and shouldn’t be stopped.
As a college kid whose campus is the literal definition of a public forum, anyone can come in, make themselves at home in the cafeteria, pull a AR-15 and do God knows what. The students of this nation are planning walkouts, sit-ins, protests and marches, because we are refusing to accept Congress’ evasion of our gun crisis. Who is going to stop us? The National Rifle Association? Ha!
We were fed with a healthy diet of dystopian futures, of kids being braver than adults, and America put us up against a government so cartoonishly evil that it would be criticized for being too cliche if this were a work of fiction.
Now, for a note, the NY Times article I mentioned uses a resource called “The Gun Violence Archive.” You can go and look it up to give you the numbers, they have data back to 2014.
If you do, you will realize one echoing, shouting, bellowing fact: Mass shootings occur less often than other types of gun violence, and cause the lowest number of gun mortality rates in America.
According to statistics from the Center for Disease Control, over 21,386 gun deaths in 2014 were suicides and 11,008 were homicides, 14 of which died in mass shootings.
14 people died in mass shooting in 2014, seems like a good year compared to the 10,994 other people shot and kill by what would most likely be a legally bought handgun.
The “gun problem” we have, isn’t just mass shootings and I want that to sink in because we only seem to talk about guns when many people die.
This begs the godforsaken question of “What is the gun problem?” Let’s start with an alarming and sobering statistic from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Violence, which describes itself as “A policy organization…on a mission to save lives from gun violence.” According to the think tank, “Americans own an estimated 270 million firearms – approximately 90 guns for every 100 people.”
That’s 90 guns for every 100 Americans! Let that sink in. I want you to know that this is not just about the recent events where everyone decides to give their own opinion for 3 weeks and then drops it like Congress does bills for gun control. This is a problem, a massive one.
The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Violence gives us does give us at least some good news. Between 1977 and 2015 the amount of homes that have guns dropped from 53 percent to 32 percent, meaning that 32 percent of Americans own 270 million firearms. That means the average American gun enthusiast owns about 3 guns in their household, one for him, one for the wife and one for the kid.
Let’s talk gun control, and before gun advocates start to scream “No!” do keep in mind I’m using the word “control” and not the word “ban.” Just to be clear here, “control”- as defined by the Webster dictionary- means “To reduce the incidence or severity of, especially to innocuous levels.” To “ban” -according to the same dictionary- means “To prohibit especially by legal means.”
So I am saying let’s discuss reducing easy access to guns, not totally prohibiting the right to purchase and own them.
That being said, if gun violence continues to escalate in the USA, it is very easy to imagine how many mothers, fathers and friends will cry for a complete ban, and who is going to have the heart to deny them then?
Former President Barack Obama, at an Indiana town meeting in June 2016, made a compelling point when he compared car regulations with gun control. He said, “We used to have really bad auto fatality rates. The auto fatality rate has dropped, precipitately, drastically since I was a kid, why is that?” It was because we finally regulated the auto industry. We should do the same with the gun industry.
What’s wrong with waiting one and a half to two years to actually own a legal rifle that the government knows you are going to use properly? You are not crying out that the government is taking away your right to drive, but you have to wait awhile and learn how to actually do it before you’re legally allowed to.
Sure, some people may break the law, drive drunk, text and drive, fail to wear seatbelts or drive without a license, but at far less a rate than before laws regulating driving and auto industry laws. That’s exactly what we hope to achieve, because who wants their child to become just another statistic?
So here is my plea, my little bit of advice to the Senators, and Representatives, in our legislature: Consider me in 1 month when you forget what happened in Florida. Consider the fact that I am your future. Consider the fact that I am not going to be another statistic in an article, that the college and high school students who are told they are too childish to question their government are standing together as one and if you want to take on the future generation of your country, remember, we, your constituents, hold your paycheck in the palm of our hands, and we can take that away from you as fast as Adam Lanza took the lives of 20 children, as fast as Stephen Paddock took 58 lives, as fast as Nikolas Cruz took those 14 students and three faculty from us. Don’t believe me, don’t believe us, keep gun laws the way they are and see how long you last.
