When our founding fathers sat down, envisioned our nation, and wrote our constitution, could they have imagined a future where America was the leader in mass shootings? According to an article from PBS Newshour, in 2015 alone there were 372 mass shootings in the United States, resulting in 475 deaths, and the Mass Shooting Tracker currently accounts for 182 mass shootings where four of more people are harmed or killed.
The tragedy of our circumstance is that we have accepted mass shootings as a part of our culture; we fear them, we expect them, and when they inevitably happen, we mourn for the victims they take and the families that will never be the same. Despite our moving declarations of love and resilience in the face of horror, we have let these shootings shape us as a nation and have done little to stop them from happening.
Every time a large mass shooting falls into the national spotlight, the debate over gun control fires back up. Politicians come out on both sides of the argument, some saying that stricter background checks and gun regulations are required, and others saying that a war on guns can only be won with more guns, but as much as we seem to be talking about the issue of guns, little has actually been done.
There is much that the United States could learn about gun control and how it affects the rates of mass shootings from other advanced countries. Take Australia for example. In 1996, a deranged man with two semi-automatic weapons went on a shooting spree, killing 35 and injuring 23. Shortly thereafter, the National Firearms Agreement of Australia enacted a ban on semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and pump-action shotguns, as well as a mandatory buyback of almost one million guns. The process of purchasing a gun in Australia requires that the intended owner obtain a license and pass a background check that can take months.
What’s the upside to all these difficult regulations? Australia hasn’t seen a mass shooting resulting in four or more injuries and deaths in twenty years. Granted, it’s not a perfect system, the Australian Crime Commission acknowledges the fact that there are still a great deal of illegal arms, but Australia’s quick action in making it far more difficult to legally obtain guns and banning weapons of war clearly had an effect.
It’s at times like this, when the discussion of mandatory gun buybacks and bans on weapon purchases begins, that the Second Amendment is invoked. The Second Amendment states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” When the Second Amendment was passed, the year was 1791, and the weapons our founding fathers had in mind were muskets that fired .75 caliber musket balls and took ages to reload, not semi-automatic assault weapons like the popular AR-15 which can fire up to 60 rounds per minute.
When they declared that every citizen had the right to bear arms, they meant that every citizen had the right to defend themselves and provide food for their family, not that every citizen had the right to be able purchase a weapon and use it to kill other human beings. The point is, times, weapons, and situations have changed, and if we don’t plan to update the Second Amendment to reflect these changes, we need to get serious about gun control.
I've been reading many articles about people who don't want to talk about gun control laws right now, who just want to mourn, and I understand. As a person of the LGBTQ+ community this attack hits particularly close to home, and I am both saddened and frightened by the actions this man took. But I also recognize that, had stricter gun regulations been in place and a simple background check been run, this man would not have been able to purchase his weapon legally like he did, and some serious red flags would have been raised.
If we don’t want to talk about these things now, when 50 of our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and friends lay dead, when will we talk about them? When the next mass shooting happens? When our child is the one who loses their life at the hands of someone who should not have been able to get their hands on a weapon of war so easily?
Perhaps at this time in the United States it's too much to ask to do a mandatory buyback of assault weapons, but is it really too much to ask to ban semi-automatic weapons of war that have been linked, not once, not twice, but 14 times to the massacre of innocent civilians? Is it too much to ask for stricter background checks and firmer gun regulations that would make it more difficult in situations like this for people will bad intentions to harm others, and send warnings to the authorities? If it is too much to ask, then maybe we need to reevaluate our priorities as a nation.
After all, in America you can buy a semi-automatic rifle or shotgun with little to no difficulty depending on where you are, but Kinder Eggs are banned because they contain “embedded toys” and could pose a choking hazard. In America, you can rape an incapacitated girl on a college campus and get six months prison time for destroying her life, but our children aren't allowed to read The Higher Power of Lucky in schools because it contains the word "scrotum."
Here we are, America. The year is 2016, and we are afraid of the country we live in. Despite scientific evidence supporting the fact that higher gun rates leads to higher rates of gun violence and the evidence that countries with lower rates of gun ownership have less incidence of mass shootings, we continue to allow for mass shootings to happen in our country on a daily basis by doing nothing.
In this country, land of the free, home of the brave, everyone has the right to bear arms, but we seem to forget that in this country people also have certain unalienable rights, “that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Are semi-automatic weapons more important than these rights?
