On Thursday, Feb. 18, the University of Massachusetts’ Amherst campus was placed on lockdown after an assault against a student by two armed men occurred in a freshman dormitory. All injuries were minor. A mere three days later, the citizens of Kalamazoo, Mich., experienced a comparable scare but were not lucky enough to emerge similarly unscathed. Uber driver Jason Dalton first decided to bring the gun that he shouldn’t have owned in the first place to a residence, where he shot and injured a mother as her children watched. He then headed to a local car dealership and killed two men, seemingly at random. The third and final stop of his spree was the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Four people were fatally shot here, bringing the total tally to six deaths and nine victims. Two of the three injured people are in critical condition.
When the ever-present threat of a school shooting had a brush with reality, thousands of parents of UMass Amherst students frantically texted their sons and daughters on Thursday and awaited a response in agonizing suspense. The entire city of Kalamazoo will be mourning for weeks to come, because six lives were cut short thanks to one deeply troubled man who owned a gun and decided to fire it at random. The scariest part about stories like these is that they no longer seem scary. Hearing of yet another shooting is no longer jarring. Gun violence is officially a part of U.S. culture. Instead of giving up our Second Amendment right to bear arms, as a country we chose to sacrifice the 475 lives lost in mass shootings alone, and the 13,286 total lives lost to gun violence in the United States in 2015. We have decided that last year’s 372 mass shootings and 1,870 resulting injuries are a fair price to pay for us all to be able to own an assault weapon. In a country that enables and turns a blind eye to assaults of all varieties, this comes as no surprise.
The less shocking, though, the more urgent the problem becomes. It is not normal for such brutality to be normal; this lack of sensitivity is barbaric. A 14-year-old girl is lying in a hospital bed in critical condition in Michigan right now. College students are being shot on their way to class. Kindergarteners are told to line up so that bullets can be blown through them one by one in eerily organized callousness. People are being shot for their religion or the color of their skin. In 2015, the U.S. hit a record high for murders of transgender people simply due to their nonconforming gender identity. Although many of us are inclined to think otherwise, humans are very capable of hatred and of violence, and this fact is not limited to those with psychiatric diagnoses. Therefore, putting murder weapons in the hands of the general population is probably not the safest tactic.
By saying that the government should not have the capacity to take away our Second Amendment right to bear arms, people like Jason Dalton are granted the right to take away innocent lives. We incarcerate perpetrators of gun violence post-attack, but that does not bring the victims back from the dead, or heal affected communities. Clearly, our blasé, after-the-fact approach is not working. The sheer number of lives lost thus far nullifies any argument in favor of our current gun laws. It is imperative that we begin to act before the trigger is pulled.
