October 31, Chicago, Illinois. 7 year old Giselle Zamago shot in the neck while trick-or-treating.
November 14, Santa Clarita, California. 14 year old Dominic Blackwell and 15 year old Gracie Anne Muehlberger fatally shot at school.
November 15, Pleasantville, New Jersey. 10 year old Micah Tennant killed at his school’s football playoff game.
November 18, Fresno, California. Four people murdered while enjoying a backyard football party.
These are just four examples of the hundreds of shootings that have occured in 2019 alone in the United States. By the end of November, there had been 399 mass shootings with 466 people dead, for no reason at all. Why are we allowing so much death to occur within our country? We are not at war, nobody is invading our country, there is no deadly virus sweeping the nation. Americans are killing Americans. With guns.
This problem in our country is not due to foreigners, as much as our current president and many people want to believe it is. This is occurring because of the lack of gun control in the United States. This is Americans hurting each other with nobody doing anything about it. All we can do is try to be the voice amongst the youth, but in reality, we have no power alone. There are so many people in our country who would rather keep their precious gun for hunting rather than fight for the violence to end -- fight for the lives of the innocent, fight to stop so much of this easily avoidable death.
Although the second amendment does declare that “...the right of people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,” that does not mean it is right or just. That amendment was ratified over 200 years ago. The world back then was quite different from the world we are in now, especially considering our advanced level of technology. I would only hope that people would be willing to forfeit this amendment in order to save the lives of the hundreds of people who lose their lives every year due to gun violence.
It is a common argument that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But, I have to disagree. Although people are the ones pulling the trigger, there would be no trigger to be pulled if we fought for stricter gun control. Just think, what disadvantages could there possibly be to less guns? There really are none. Guns should not be falling into the hands of people who are untrained or plan to use them to kill innocent people. In a perfect world, guns would not exist.
More realistically, the only people who really need guns are trained police officers, who don’t intend to use them unless completely necessary. No matter how much someone may complain or protest, guns seem to ultimately have the sole purpose of hurting or killing. It is hard to find many benefits from the existence of these weapons. However, since these weapons are in existence, we must take action to do something to prevent these weapons from falling into the hands of the wrong people so easily.
Some may argue that guns are needed for protection because it would be impossible to get rid of all guns. There would likely still be some sort of underground, top secret, dark web sale of guns. Although this may be a valid point, we should still pursue significant gun control legislations. All I am asking for is a little more safety, just some laws that don’t make it so easy to buy a gun and open fire at a school.
There must be more regulations or necessary background checks to lower the amount of untrained people who can get their hands on a gun. It is not even all guns that are the problem. The issue is that people who are not trained or mentally stable have access to assault rifles. There is simply no purpose for assault rifles in our society. Assault rifles are killing machines. I cannot think of a single scenario in everyday life in which a person would need to kill or shoot at so many people at such a high speed. People who purchase these weapons are using them to murder. Most school shootings on the news involve an assault rifle, the likely culprit for what was used in the horrific tragedy. These weapons are simply inexcusable to have in a home, or school, or anywhere at all. They are intended to kill many people quickly. We need to instill rules that will prevent the sales and easy ways to access these manslaughter machines.
It is not fair that we are forced to come to school everyday in fear of a school shooter. It is not just school anymore; it seems like everywhere we go there is always that lingering fear that maybe somebody will have a gun. In my job at my temple, I watched young students meet with police officers to learn about what to do if somebody enters the temple with a gun. This is something that my peers and I did not have to learn about at such a young age, because it was not so common, at the time, that a shooter would walk into a synagogue. Now, we are forced to teach children as young as eight years old that bad people will want to hurt you for no reason at all, and they can easily do that with the guns we are allowing them to have.
In past generations, school was not a place that had to be feared. There were not weekly new stories on the most recent school shooting. As sad as it sounds, I have almost reached the point where it is typical to see shootings on the news because they happen so frequently. It is not fair that we are the ones facing the repercussions of the lack of political action.
Maybe in the past, it was not easy to discuss guns, or bring the topic of the second amendment into debate. Now, it is essential that the issue of gun violence is included in the conversation. In the past decade, and especially the past two years, the number of school shootings in the United States is higher than it has ever been. School is supposed to be a place of learning and socializing, not somewhere to fear for your life. After the Parkland shooting and, more recently, the school shooting in California, it becomes more apparent that the only people fighting are those affected and that the government is not attempting to make any changes. Does it really take the experience of a shooting for a person to raise awareness and try to cause change? It seems like so many people are blind to the deaths and injuries that occur every day at the hands of guns. We have reached a point where thoughts and prayers are no longer enough. We need change. We need activism. We need to end this slowly occurring massacre.
Here in Ardsley, we are blessed to have never experienced a horrific event like a school shooting. We should all be counting our prayers for how lucky we are in this dangerous world that we live in. This does not mean that we should be any less active in trying to end this crisis among us. Ardsley is a small village, but if we put our voices together, we can try to make a change. We can try and stop the next school shooting by actively attempting to end gun violence. In our day and age, we have the technology and social media to allow for our voices to be heard louder than ever. Please reach out to your local politicians. Write, call, do anything you can. And if nothing happens, keep trying. It is up to us to help our country in this war within itself. We can make the change that we keep saying we would like to see.