This summer, I shot a gun for the first time. Having grown up in Maine, many of my friends grew up using BB guns and shotguns on hunting trips, but my urbanized parents never introduced my siblings and me to such behavior. I was in no way raised in a sheltered manner, but guns were never part of my Irish mother’s method of raising her five children. But this summer, for her birthday, my mother decided that it might be a memorably laughable experience for the seven of us to go to a skeet shooting range. We founded ourselves suited up with protective gear and earplugs before getting a lesson on how to operate the shotgun. The instructor warned us of the noise and the recoil, but my persistent overconfidence (especially in situations I really just cannot handle) told me that I would be just fine.
We stepped up to the booth and my stepfather, an ex-Navy officer, perfectly hit all three targets. Naturally, I equated my zero experience with guns to the same caliber of experience as my stepdad, and so I volunteered to go next. I widened my stance, steadied the gun on my shoulder, and zeroed in on the target as I yelled “Pull!” to signal my readiness. I pulled the trigger and was immediately rocked with the most extreme force I had ever felt. The recoil was so much stronger than I had anticipated, leaving a nasty bruise on my shoulder and a shrill ring in my ear for hours afterward. But it wasn’t the recoil of shooting the gun that scared me the most; rather, it was the power I had felt behind the machine. When I shot the gun, I was not the one in control. I realized the potential for damage and harm this machine had, and it sent a terrifying chill deep into my bones. This was a weapon, meant to do irreparable harm to its target.
Guns and gun control have become a massively huge issue in the United States. In the last week alone, there were three shootings at schools around the nation. At Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, nine students were shot and killed by a 26-year-old student with known emotional issues and a record of previous destructive behavior. At Northern Arizona University, four fraternity men found themselves in a fight that culminated in one eighteen-year-old student pulling a gun on three others and fatally shooting one. On Friday, at Texas Southern University, three assailants attacked two known victims, one of whom died from a gunshot wound. This was only in the last week, not to mention the twenty other school shootings that have occurred in 2015 alone.
Students at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, pay their respects to those who lost their lives in last week's shooting.
Massacres such as these are coupled by cases of domestic violence shootings, accidental firings, and more. Too many people die at the hand of a gun operated by those who are in no state to be operating such a machine. But when we hear of police officers using their guns in a questionable manner and taking yet another life, one cannot help but question the use of guns by even those trained to use them. In November of 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by an officer in training because he was holding a pellet gun, which is typically used for sport or hunting. In recent news, two prosecutors said that the shooting of this young boy was “reasonable.” Two grown men claimed it was reasonable for a boy with his entire life ahead of him to be shot because he was holding a BB gun, which can do damage in its own right, but nothing like what that officer in training did to Rice, or his family, or the community of Cleveland, where Rice resided.
Tamir Rice
Presidential candidate Donald Trump recently proposed that, in an effort to combat the pandemic of school shootings in the United States, teachers should be armed to dissuade the shooter or to make students feel “safer.” Rather than propose stricter gun laws or eradicate the presence of firearms among communal society, it has been suggested that we put more guns into the population. Fight fire with fire, right? Wrong.
I don’t know what it will take for it to happen, but the only way society and community can grow and flourish is if we implement stricter gun laws. We need harsher realities on who should be using firearms, whether in the form of background checks or psychological evaluation. No one deserves to live in fear that they might be shot on their walk home for looking “suspicious,” or that an average day at school could turn into a massacre. This country is heartbroken and torn apart over the innocent lives, young and old alike, that are taken from us far too often. We need to recall what made us so great for so long, and eradicate the violence that has poisoned the patriotic blood that pumps in our veins.
As a country based on the premise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we the people of the United States of America cannot create a society for the next generation in which guns and violence are as prevalent as they are. Yes, one of our inalienable rights is the right to bear arms. But just as with freedom of speech and accusations of slander and libel, there comes a point at which the right to bear arms becomes irrelevant in those eyes of those whose lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness were destroyed by a gunshot.
