Keeping the victims and their families in our “thoughts and prayers” is not enough anymore. We need to stand up to the problem that the United States faces every day. While mental illness is to blame for some aspects of this country’s frequent mass shootings, the easy access to guns is where the United States goes wrong every time.

The United States has been fighting gun laws since the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado. On April 20, 1999, two students opened fire and killed 12 fellow students and 1 teacher, as well as injuring 21 others. It has been more than 20 years since the shooting and barely any action has taken place to help stop all the horror that occurs every day in our country.

Since the Columbine shooting, there have been roughly 230 mass shootings in high schools across the United States alone. This does not include colleges or elementary school shootings like Sandy Hook or mass shootings outside of schools. The United States averages about one mass shooting per day, and as of 2013, there has only been one full week where there was no mass shooting.

In March of this year, New Zealand experienced a mass shooting, and the country’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, took action. Just 26 days after the incident she was able to ban assault rifles and tighten gun laws. However, the United States has yet to make progress towards stopping the destruction that guns are causing.

The United States is one of the leading countries in the highest number of mass shootings in the world. We have more guns in our country then we have people living here, with an estimated 393,347,000 guns compared to 328,995,614 people. The process of buying firearms in most of the United States is so relaxed that just about anybody can get one, and in some states this is true even if you are under 18 years old.

For example, all you generally need to do is walk into a store, have the worker run a background check, fill out paperwork, and as little as a few minutes later you could have a gun in your hands.

For a more nontraditional and much easier way to get a gun, just go to a gun show, which are constantly being hosted all over the country. At the shows, there is no FBI check and no background check; you can just buy a gun. Just fill out your name and show your ID, fake or real, and you are free to buy any gun you choose.

People all over the world are standing up against the issue of mass shootings. After the horrific shooting on February 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead, the “March for Our Lives” movement has been making a stand and many students from the La Salle community have joined the fight by protesting with them or sharing the news on their social media to spread awareness of the problem.

Mass shootings are not the only problems though, and in fact they only represent around 5% of gun-related deaths. The majority of gun-related deaths are connected to homicides and suicides, which could be helped if the process of obtaining guns was more difficult.

The United States, along with many other countries, has been fighting for gun control for so long but so little has happened. There is no way to bring back the millions of people who have died due to gun violence, but we have the potential to stop more deaths from occurring in our world. While banning guns is not a reasonable solution as there will always be some way to get a hold of one, if we made the system of accessing a gun much harder, then far less deaths would occur.
Photo by Joanna Nix on Unsplash. Used with permission.