Twenty children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012. Sandy Hook is considered the second deadliest shooting in U.S. History. People all across the country mourned for these young lives, and thinking about the tragedy still overwhelms a lot of people.
In a statement made to the press right after the horrific shootings, President Obama said, “We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end, and to end them we must change.” Anyone who experienced the Sandy Hook shootings will probably remember how motivated our country was to make a change. New regulations was put into schools, kids as young as 5 years old were doing A.L.I.C.E. Training. A.L.I.C.E. Stands for Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate, all of the steps that you’re supposed to follow if there’s ever an actual shooting at your school. Freshmen are required to take A.L.I.C.E. Training at many colleges, including Cleveland State.
However, no new regulations or laws were put on guns. Despite the fact that all of the guns that the Sandy Hook shooter used in the shooting were legally owned, no regulations were put in place.
A mass shooting is defined as a shooting in which four or more people are hurt or killed. Since Sandy Hook, there has been 1,052 mass shootings in the United States; 353 of those are just in the year of 2015. So far in 2015, we’ve had more mass shootings than we have had days in the year.
After one mass shooting in 1996, Australia put forth some of the strictest gun regulations in the world. And even better, it’s worked for them. They still have shootings, but nothing even close to what the United States goes through. One can only guess how many lives Australia saved with that law.
The United States doesn’t change anything regarding gun control laws, despite how many people are killed with legally owned guns each year. We train our kids to be prepared, we report the shootings on the news, and even our president talks about stricter gun control. But nothing is done to make stricter gun control a reality.
A lot of people thought that the Sandy Hook shooting was going to be the one that tipped the scales. Maybe, just maybe, the death of 20 kids would be enough to wake us up and actually do something.
We did nothing.
Instead, society got into this weird mentality where we go, “Oh, that’s too bad” upon hearing of another mass shooting. There’s upped security in all schools, the students of all ages are taught how to react and handle a shooting in their school. Instead of making sure that a mass shooting like Sandy Hook never happened again, the United States prepared everyone for the reality that it would happen again.
It did happen again, more times than people can wrap their heads around. Three years and 1,052 shootings later, there still hasn’t been a real, proactive response to the problem of gun violence. A lot of people have given up on the idea that anything will be done about gun violence period. But how many more people have to die before the United States does something?
