After September 11, US citizens came together as a country, mourned the people that died, tightened airport security and started a war. Those precautions were were all an effort to fight terror and mass death. We grew as a country and some things are safer.
Did we really do enough though? The tragedy in Las Vegas did not only ruin people’s lives, it destroyed families. Some of the members of our community were there. It could have been any of us at that concert.
After this recent tragedy, we need to choose solutions that are deeper. We need to fix the issues that lead to these tragedies. As a country, we tend to “duct tape” our problems together and hope it does not happen again instead of fixing them. Yes, we could ban firearms, and it would probably cut back gun violence. But, 62 percent of firearm deaths in America are suicide (https://everytownresearch.org/).
If we chose to take away the right to bear arms, we would only be duct taping the issue. To put the gun violence issues in perspective, there are 12,000 gun homicides in the United States a year (https://everytownresearch.org/ ). In 2015 alone, there were 10,265 fatal traffic accidents that involved alcohol (https://www.cdc.gov/). These statistics show that people do not need a firearm to make a horrible decision.
We need to find deeper and more effective solutions to our problems to combat these repulsive statistics because every person that dies is a friend, a child somebody’s parent or grandparent.
We as citizens of the United State are entitled to our own opinions. There is not anything wrong with believing that confiscating firearms would solve our gun violence issue.
I believe that a productive solution would first be to get rid of the stigma that asking for help is a sign of weakness. There is nothing shameful about getting help whether it be from a psychiatrist, parent or friend. We need to pick the little guy up when he’s down because at some point all of us will be that guy. I believe that we need to teach better ways of coping and positive ways to deal with mental illness in our schools.
Once we fix all of our mental issues, then we could consider banning firearms.
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