Enough is enough.
It’s becoming a very disturbing trend to wake up every morning and hear about a mass shooting that took place the day before on your home soil. It’s even worse because it’s the same issue that has been plaguing America for the past few years. Ever since the Sandy Hook school shooting, I feel like gun violence has increased dramatically across the country. First it was Sandy Hook, then it was the Aurora Theater, then San Bernardino, and now the Pulse night club in Orlando Florida. Why does someone feel the need to kill innocent people with a gun? is the question we should be asking ourselves.
People want to make the argument that it’s not guns that kill people, its people that kill people with guns. However, there is a lot more to this argument than a simple black & white answer. In America, people seem more comfortable killing each other with guns more than anything else compared to other countries. The New York Times recently released an article that discussed how gun violence in the U.S. compared to other countries. The FBI reported that the number of gunshot murders in the U.S. reached 8,124 in 2014. Compared to other countries, that’s an extremely high number for gunshot murders. The New York Times article then compared the chances of deaths by guns to chances of dying of other incidents in other countries. For example, in Japan, gun homicides are about as common as death from being struck by lightning. In Germany, gun homicides are as common as death by being hit by a falling object. These are two highly industrialized countries like the United States, yet they have minuscule chances of dying by a gunshot compared to the U.S. Last time I checked, Germany and Japan have people too, yet they don’t use guns to kill each other, there’s more to the argument that people kill people with guns.
So why is gun violence so prevalent in America today? One reason could be that we see guns everywhere in our lives. There is a multitude of different platforms from the real world to virtual reality that guns are discussed or used in the world on a daily basis. It’s extremely hard for anyone to go a day without seeing what guns can do to one person or millions of people. Being exposed to that pressure everyday could be harder for some people to handle. Maybe that leads some people to decide that using a gun is the only way to get what they want whether it’s right or wrong. Perhaps the constant exposure to gun use is a reason why people gravitate towards killing people with guns.
That even though guns will always be around, they will never have power over us. We stop showing or promoting gun use and maybe we stop people from seeing guns as a solution to a problem they have. Guns shouldn’t be the most visible object in our world. Too many Americans have died because of this object. Enough is enough.
