After everything that has been happening in the news lately, I found myself thinking a great deal about gun control. I have been wondering how the topic of gun control makes its way into the news on a regular basis, yet we let the issue remain unresolved.
After the shooting this past summer at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which took the lives of nine parishioners, Jon Stewart wisely stated,
"I don’t want to get into the political argument of the guns and things. But what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us, and us killing ourselves."
How is it that three short years ago, 20 innocent children and six adults were killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, and action has still not been taken? Just one month ago, there was yet another shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.
We need to take these tragic occurrences and make a difference. Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And that is precisely what we are doing. When are we going to realize that not doing anything is not going to solve this issue?
Jon Stewart also captured our inability to solve this problem by stating,
"But why is it that, when there is no other issue in this country with as dire public safety consequences as this, that we are unable to make even the most basic steps towards putting together a complex plan of action to slow this epidemic's spread?"
A plan of action must be taken. One of the worst massacres in Australia’s history occurred in 1996. 35 people were killed and 18 were seriously injured. Only 12 days after the shooting, the Australian state and federal leaders “passed new legislation that would restrict and prohibit the sale and ownership of almost every kind of semi-automatic rifle and rapid-fire gun over the course of a little more than two years.” Sixteen years later, significant results can be seen.
In 2012, the Guardian published new statistics drawn from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Small Arms Survey showing only "30 homicides by firearm" annually in Australia, or "0.14 per 100,000 population."
The U.S. statistics are bloated by comparison. Over the same period, Americans suffered "9,146 homicides by firearm," at a rate of 2.97 for every 100,000 people. Sixty percent of murders in the U.S. are committed with a gun, according to the Guardian, compared to 11.5 percent in Australia.
According to the Washington Post, there have been 294 mass shootings in the first 274 days of 2015. Though this is a controversial issue, it is an issue that must be addressed. The fact that it is still being debated speaks volumes about our country's priorities. How many more innocent people must die before action is taken? Just one more innocent life is not worth this.
