Shooting
When I was 17 years old my classmates and I were held after school for three hours after the typical release time because there was a shooter somewhere in the building.
It ended when a swat team came in and demanded to search our backpacks. I know that I have rights and that people aren’t legally allowed to search you unless they have a warrant, but when you have a whole team of people with as guns as big as you are, you’re happy to not only let them search your bag, but take the whole thing if they wanted to.
We were escorted out with instructions to keep our hands on our heads. What we saw was something else- helicopters, ambulances, all the police cars in the valley, and even an armored vehicle.
That day didn’t feel completely out of the norm for us. I think apart of the students expected to be victims of a shooting at some point or another, with 1,300 shootings since 1970. The question is, why does this keep happening?
To answer that question, we’ll look at one article in particular, the New England journal of medicine’s how to stop mass shootings, which can be found and read here-
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1807277
This article uses specific examples to make a point- the marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the first Baptist church of southern springs, etc. In the year that my school had a shooting, 2015, there were 33,636 deaths due to firearms, with homicides accounting for 1/3 of those deaths, and that’s in the US alone.
To give you a grasp of what the US school shootings are like compared to other countries, the United States has 57 times more school shootings as the other industrialized nations combined.
Why does the United States have more mass shootings than other countries? It’s difficult to say, but Garen J. Wintemute points out that some may be influenced by the ‘copycat phenomenon’, where research has shown that people will try to replicate shootings within 13 days of an incident. The US has a higher access to guns than most other countries, which would feed into this phenomenon.
How can shootings be prevented? Wintemute writes that one way that we can prevent these tragic events is by making it a legal requirement to preform background checks before selling guns. Many places will practice this, but there are countless third party transactions that never look into someone’s background before making a sale.
Another way Wintemute suggests to prevent gun violence is through firearm restraining orders. If someone has committed domestic violence or is struggling with severe mental disorders, the court and physicians should be able to temporarily ban them from purchasing weapons.
Another major way to prevent mass shootings would be to ban military style assault weapons. Many people say that this is infringing our right to bare arms. Let’s talk about that.
There are several reasons that the US fights for their guns and easy access to them. The main ones are to protect homes and businesses, to hunt, for pest control, for recreation, and for social purposes.
We do not need military style assault weapons to protect our homes. We do not need military style assault weapons to hunt. We do not need military style assault weapons for social or recreational purposes.
These weapons were made specifically to kill people, a lot of people. The only people who would miss military style assault weapons are potential mass murders.
Even though the US has suffered a staggering loss of 1.4 million people from firearms between 1968 and 2011, the changes to prevent this are few and far between.
New Zealand recently suffered from a mass shooting where 50 people were murdered at a mosque prayer. What did they do? Within 72 hours, they banned military style assault weapons.
Would Wintemutes suggestions make a difference? Can we really stop the unnecessary murders? I believe that they will, and that we can.
We can make a change here. We need to focus on protecting children, not guns. I hope that I never find myself in a shooting situation again, but unless we make changes happen soon, I just might be.