I'm tired of the lists.
I'm tired of the fact that we have a need for a new list of names nearly every week. Lists of the dead from the most recent mass shooting or instance of gun violence.
I'm tired of seeing a list of more people that died. LGBT+, straight, religious, atheist, white, people of color ... the list of names goes on and on, and I'm tired of it.
This past week it was Orlando, but there was several other instances of gun violence over the weekend. Christina Grimmie was one of them. But the scariest part is that there are other lists that we never see. Lists of people killed because there are cases where someone can get their own gun without even showing an ID.
There have been 182 mass shootings since the beginning of 2016 in America. We're only 169 days into the year. A mass shooting is describes as four or more people shot in an incident by the FBI.
That means there have been more mass shooting than there have been days, and we're not even halfway through the year.
Do you know how many lists that is?
Or how long one list of all the people shot and killed in a mass shooting since 2016 has started?
I'm tired of it, and I think it is time America tried to change things.
Gun control is so nonexistent here that it's laughable. After 9/11, we changed the laws so that it was a lot harder to turn a plane into a weapon. People can't bring box cutters or almost anything sharp onto a plane, liquids are limited, people have to have to go through screening for anything they could be carrying, and if you don't have a ticket, you can't go past security. This wasn't an issue America had after they changed the laws because someone proved there was an issue when many people died.
So it would make sense that we would be stricter on our gun laws after 20 children died at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, wouldn't it?
Nothing has changed. 1,065 have died since in a mass shooting since that day. For every one of those deaths, there's another three that have been injured in a mass shooting.
Instead of making stricter gun laws, only 13 out of 50 states require someone to have a license or permit buy a gun, there's no limits on how many you can buy, there's no wait period, there's no references required, and sometimes you aren't even required to show an ID.
You want to know things that you have to do some of those things for?
A drivers license, cold medicine, a divorce, and a pet. It's harder to get all of those things in most states rather than a gun, and there's a problem with that when we have more mass shooting so far this year than we have days.
There's no reason for someone to own an assault weapon like the one used in the recent Orlando shooting, and any other gun that could be acquired needs to have far stricter regulation.
Classes on gun safety and the dangers of a gun, a permit required to learn with required practical learning times and a license required to actually own your own weapon, being required to keep the bullets and the gun in different locked containers on different ends of the house, not having concealed weapons, much more thorough background checks, and requiring a valid ID would all be a good start.
These are laws that are in place in countries like Australia, Japan and Switzerland, which all have much lower rates of gun violence than we do because they actually took the time to make these laws after horrible mass shootings.
So instead of lists of names, let's make lists of laws for once. Let's not have people continue to lose their lives to such senselessness.
I'm tired of lists of the dead.
It's time for a change.