Overview to Gun Violence in Schools

Imagine waking up one morning, a typical school day, getting your child, sister, or any member of your family ready for their school day. You can barely wake them up, they use the restroom and take forever, then get dressed, have breakfast, and finally leave for school. They leave to school like they always do, expect this time they never come back. It turns out that the family member was shot and killed along with his classmates in a mass shooting incident by an unidentified attacker. I hope I never have to deal with a situation such as this one, and I am guessing so do you. But a lot of people had to deal with such a situation and a lot will end up dealing with it. Due to guns we are now facing a problem that cannot be ignored. Right now according to Brady campaign guns kill an average of eight children and teens under the age of 20 everyday. Moreover, on average every year about 1895 children and teens are murdered in gun violence incidents. These numbers are beyond imagination. Gun violence in schools is out of control in the U.S and is only getting worse. Below is a chart demonstrating the number of incidents that happened in the United States since 1992. As a nation, we can do better than this.

Furthermore, there are many viewpoints on guns, the article named “Gun Law and Crime,” by Mark Guis explains the different viewpoints on guns. The author talks about how some people think that guns are a problem and they advocate to limit the access to them, while others think of owning guns as “a constitutionally protected right, and that gun control laws are not only unconstitutional but also very ineffective” (Guis, 6). The article also discusses how guns and their impact on the American society have been put on full display after incidents such as Sandy Hook (where 20 Children and 6 staff were killed) and Virginia Tech Shooting (where 32 people were killed). He also explains that dozens of innocent people have been killed at the hands of disturbed young men. And this all happened because they had easy access to guns.

Ever since guns were created they brought upon us many miseries and tragedies. People might claim that guns are useful when used by the right person. They can “protect” you and keep you “safe.” I find this claim to be a very narrow and unsophisticated one, it emits a lot of possibilities and cherry picks the benefits of gun ownership. When they said “used by the right person” I am pretty sure that person is human. Humans are imperfect by nature, when one is angry the trigger can be pulled instantly. Moreover, it is true that some people are better gun holders than others, but the “bad ones” still exist. When you give the so called “good gun owners” the right to access and have guns, you are also allowing the “not so good ones” get them too. All these are possibilities that need to be kept in mind. Gun ownership has some benefits, but its harms are very severe and not worth the benefits of keeping them.

Solutions for the problem of gun violence in schools have been implemented, but they are still far off from completely stopping gun violence. The government has passed many gun control laws, they were somewhat effective in reducing gun shootings, but the number of incidents happening is still way too large to be ignored. From my point of view there are much better solutions for gun violence than gun control laws. Catlin Bonanno and Richard Levenson propose some great solutions and ways of preventing such incidents in their article named “School Shooters: History, Current Theoretical and Empirical Findings, and Strategies for Prevention.” Some of these solutions are: studying the characteristics of the attackers and spreading awareness of these features. This way the attacker can be identified and dealt with before hand. The authors also include some theories of why the attackers would do such a thing as mass shootings; this can help in obtaining further knowledge about the attackers’ characteristics. These are good strategies to use when tackling this problem, even if guns were prevented there will still be illegal access to them, and this will reduce the gun violence incidents by a small degree. But if we as citizens were able to identify attackers, I can only imagine how much safer our community would be. This is problem that we all need to start dealing with because next time it might be me, you, a member of my family, or yours who is shot in a similar incident.