It’s Time to Bite The Bullet With Gun Control

On December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old man by the name of Adam Lanza, shot and killed twenty-seven people, twenty of them being between the ages of six and seven. Many thought that this would be a turning point in the USA’s gun laws, but not much was done. After countless deaths caused by gun violence, will it finally be the time this resolves? Gun control has been a hot topic for some time now, but never before has it been so greatly advocated for by youth.

After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting on February 14, 2018, a whole campaign of young people have started fighting for safer gun laws and less gun violence. (Insert thesis) Even though the United States of America has a reputation of having gun-control conflicts, there are nations that greatly top the USA’s gun violence rates. Compared to gun deaths worldwide, the US stands at 3.85 deaths per 100,000 people while El Salvador stands with the highest death rates at 40.29 deaths per 100,000 people.

Through simple math, one could figure out that there are about 3,850 deaths every year in the US due to guns, which is quite alarming. Many young people express that if America and other countries had stricter gun laws, deaths rates due to guns would go down, but the NRA (National Rifle Association) disagrees. They claim that strict gun laws haven’t helped keep any young people in the violent place of El Salvador, but in reality, their high gun violence rates are due to gangs, not gun restrictions.

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Many young activists have claimed that stricter gun restrictions would keep young people much safer, and countries like Australia prove that point. After a massacre involving guns, the country severely tightened down on gun laws and has zero mass shootings since 1996 when the massacre took place.

Although these gun restrictions worked very well for the country of Australia, it has been argued that their specific programs just aren’t feasible in America. An Australian journalist from the New York Times inculcates this to our different relationships with guns. He stated that Australians have a very different relationship with these weapons while “Americans love guns” and that “We’re scared of them” (Patrick, 2). Other countries have also had major success with implementing gun control laws. According to the BBC, “In 2014 there were just six gun deaths[in Japan], compared to 33,599 in the US.” This article by the BBC also mentioned that in order to get a gun in Japan, one had to “attend an all-day class, take a written exam and pass a shooting-range test with a mark of at least 95%” (Low, 1).

America needs to tighten up its gun laws to keep its youth safe, but how? The March For Our Lives campaign was formed but student survivors of the Stoneman Douglas shooting that took 17 lives. These youth activists aim for safer gun laws to prevent another major shooting like the one that took the lives of their peers and teachers. One of the survivors, David Hogg stated only hours after the shooting that he didn’t “‘want this to be another mass shooting.’”, he didn’t want this event “‘just to be something that people forget.’” (Nytimes.com).

This campaign has started an uprising in youth of all different backgrounds. They all seem to really emphasize the effects that gun violence has on young people, but what are those effects? In America alone, every year around 3 million children witness gun-related violence. The children who are exposed to this crime and gun violence are “more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol” (Everytownresearch.org), suffer from mental illness, and more likely to commit crime. This could constitute to why places with such high gun violence rates also have high crime rates and lots of gang involvement.