I remember the transition of tornado drills to active shooter drills. Schools had kids in elementary, middle, and high school learn how to protect themselves against an active shooter. Instead of making it more difficult to get a gun, the government expects teachers to fight and for students to hide. The government would rather protect the people's right to bear arms than the people themselves.
I was a sophomore in high school when a man with a weapon was close to our campus. I was in my chemistry class, all the students hid away from the doors and windows, while my teacher prepared Hydraulic acid and carried daggers in case the attacker forced himself in our classroom. We were stuck in the classroom, in lockdown for four hours.
I was a junior in high school when Stoneman Douglas High School was shot up by Nikolas Cruz. Stoneman Douglas High School is 35 to 45 minutes away from my old high school. When I heard they were being shot at my mom picked my sister and I up because she was afraid. We watched the news all week praying for the students that were hurt and the ones that were killed. Everyone in my high school days later staged a walk out to support the students in Stoneman Douglas that were fighting Congress on gun control.
I am a senior at Nova Southeastern University during the Michigan State University shooting, Covenant School shooting, and many more. According to NPR, 74 people have either been killed or injured by a gun in a school this year alone. 74 people have been killed and the United States is still debating if gun control is necessary. Tennessee recently was hit with a school shooting, and they are trying to fire democrats that cheered on protests for gun control.
According to the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, “Approximately 5% of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. And although a much larger number of mass shootings (about 25%) are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression, and an estimated 23% with substance use, in most cases these conditions are incidental.” People are most likely to cause a shooting as a result to respond to a stressor in their lives. Others become active shooters because of bullying in that same school or are in a situation involving domestic violence.
We as a people have a right to bear arms, to protect ourselves from others or to at least have the freedom to do so. But it shouldn’t be so easy to acquire a gun in the United States. There are pros and cons to gun control, a pro is that there are less guns on the street, but a con is it takes away people’s freedom and it is not a guarantee to less gun violence.
A way we as a people can lessen the amount of gun violence is take domestic violence and bullying more seriously. In 2023, a statistical study concluded that 36.5 percent of students felt they were bullied in their lifetime and 14.4 percent were bullied in the last month. Schools need to be stricter with their anti-bullying rules, so kids learn that bullying hurts people. Parents should limit their child's internet access or try to improve their self-esteem, so they are not affected by the negative comments of strangers and their classmates.
In 2023, a domestic violence study showed that in Florida 38% of women experienced domestic violence in their lifetime. Domestic violence is a stressor that leads people to get their guns from safes or buy a gun from a store to shoot up a public space. The government, the police, our society, needs to take domestic violence more seriously among women and especially among men. These people experience pain every day and you never know what beating leads them to snap and to shoot up an elementary school.
Doing a psychological evaluation or background check before the sale of a gun could identify people who are acting on a stressor, have a history of violence of any kind, or engaged in criminal activity and it could limit their accessibility to get a gun. But it does nothing for the people that already own a gun. We need gun control as much as we need to be kinder to others and listen to others, so the stressors that affect an active shooter's life can be “erased”.
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