Roseburg, Oregon on October 1st. In an all too common scene in the United States, 10 people were killed and seven others wounded in a shooting on the campus of a community college. Umpqua Community College went into lockdown as the police responded after receiving 911 calls from students inside. Days after the tragic incident, the medical examiner found that 26-year-old gunman, Chris Harper Mercer, killed himself after exchanging gun fire with the police.
President Obama responded to the tragedy with grief and anger, asking all political parties to come together to reconsider their stance on gun control. With anger, he lamented that “somehow, this has become routine." The reporting, the response, and our conversations around shootings have become so routine that we have become numb to the event. Statistically speaking, we as Americans have become numb to active shooter situations. In a study published by the FBI in 2014, tracking active shooter situations between 2000 and 2013, it found that active shooter events are becoming more and more common. The first seven years of the study found there to be 6.4 active shootings per year, while the last seven years shot up to 16.4. Seventy percent of these incidents have occurred in either a business or educational environment. Overall, there have been a total of 1,043 casualties.
Parents and their children, from preschool to college, have become scared of the one place where they should feel safe: school. Despite having signs displayed around school zones saying no guns allowed, people make their way into our schools with their weapons and take innocent lives.
One of the most intelligent people I have ever met is my current history professor at George Mason University. The first point she ever made to us in class was to say that there are wrong opinions. Contrary to what everybody likes to conveniently believe in order to hold their own flawed arguments, you can have whatever opinion you like, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right. If you cannot support your opinion with real, solid facts than your opinion is wrong. It becomes make-believe.
The facts are that the Harvard Injury Control Research Center has found substantial evidence to support that more guns among the public tends to mean more homicides. The facts show that states with high populations, more stress, more immigrants, and mental illnesses are “not correlated with more deaths from gun violence.” Instead, “States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths,” a correlation discovered in a 2011 study by economist, Richard Florida.
The United States ranks number one in the world in firearms per capita, with 88.8 guns per 100 people, and also has the highest death rate by firearms among the world’s developed nations. Although we make up less than five percent of the world’s population, we have about 35 to 50 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns.
If we really want to see a real change in the safety of our nation, then we need to start believing the facts, and not just what is convenient to believe. Clearly, Americans like their guns, but in order to make our schools, offices, and public spaces safer it’s vital that we take out the common denominator. Try as you may to come up with a reason why this doesn’t make sense to you, and you are ignoring the facts and therefore a logical opinion.
Yes, we all deserve to have our own opinions. But no, not all opinions are created equal. As gun control comes up, time after time, as more and more people die from active shooters, I urge you to look at the facts before deciding on your own opinion. Because lives count on it.
