In Rosenburg, Oregon on Oct. 1, 2015, a tragic shooting occurred at Umpqua Community College. Chris Harper-Mercy, age 26 and a student of the college, opened fire on campus and killed 9 victims along with injuring many others. As with many other shootings that occur in our country, the new big question is how we can prevent another tragic incident like this from happening again. With this brings up the typical gun control debate, where many believe banning guns is the complete solution to this sort of a problem.
Now it is easy to fall into the belief that taking away guns from the people will magically solve these types of problems where armed strangers enter public places and open fire, but that isn’t exactly how it works. Taking things away from people doesn’t ever necessarily mean that they are going to disappear, and a great example of this are the illegal drugs that are outlawed but still easily obtainable in this country. The same exact thing would occur if we were to just make all firearms illegal. People would still find some way to get a hold of them. In some of these mass shootings the weapons used are illegal to begin with, so outlawing guns might not make that much of a difference in the long run.
However that’s not to say that the United States doesn’t have a gun control problem. The US stands out among other developed countries for being home to approximately 1/3rd of all firearms in the world, with weak controls on access to firearms, and in the US there are now somewhere between 270 million and 310 million guns. That’s a lot of very dangerous weaponry just floating around in a single country. We certainly shouldn’t be completely stripping our right to bear arms and own a gun, but there should be more limitations too. It shouldn’t be as simple as walking into a Walmart with your license when it comes to getting a gun, because in some states it is exactly THAT simple. We also shouldn’t be dedicating a whole room in the house to guns because we are allowed to own a hundred different kinds in one household. There is no reason to let something so deadly be so accessible, and that’s where the problems begin to stem.
Taking away a right is never going to fix a problem, and it could rather cause more problems along with making half of the population very unhappy. But in this country it should not be so easy to get access to firearm as it is in a lot of states. I think in order to fix this mass shooting problem as well as shootings in general, we need to enforce some stricter laws and work with the people to see what is a fair medium.
