On Friday, December 14 I was waiting in my room to be picked up by my parents and taken home for the holiday when I saw the news of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I couldn’t help but watch the news unfold the rest of the day. It was captivating in the most sickening and heartrending way. Twenty first graders were killed, along with six adult school employees and the shooter’s mother.
After every mass shooting like this, our politicians and the media hang their heads and cry, “Why?,” lamenting the situation as if America is somehow cursed by an inevitable violent fate. They always say, “Now is not the time for partisan politics, now is the time to grieve.” But that is the biggest insult to the memories of the thousands of victims of gun violence over the past years: to cry and do nothing.
Now it feels as though the voices calling for change are louder, and maybe something will actually happen this time. Perhaps the slaughter of a bunch of children was enough to push people over the edge.
When attempting to solve some of these issues, there are plenty of people who try to spread misinformation. Some will say that ending gun violence is simple, blaming one thing for the whole catastrophe. But the solution to ending our pandemic of gun violence in this country is not simple. It must be multifaceted and comprehensive to truly have a long-lasting effect of drastically reducing the number of shootings. Gun violence is not just about guns. It is not just about mental health. It is not just about violent video games and movies. Gun violence is about all three: a culture that celebrates power, independence and violent force, and stigmatizes and delegitimizes people who do not fit the norm.
Another piece of propaganda is that restricting gun sales is some huge infringement on the Second Amendment of the Constitution. The amendment was formulated in a time when a gun could kill maybe two people a minute, if the gunman was skilled. And no one ever mentions that the amendment talks about the right to bear arms in relation to maintaining a “well regulated Militia.” The Constitution is not some holy, infallible document. It has been changed throughout the years to reflect progress. And even though we have the Bill of Rights, there are still restrictions. For instance, we have the right to free speech, but you can’t yell, “fire” in a crowded theater. So it would not be some unprecedented, malicious infringement on our liberties to restrict the sale of mega-destructive weapons.
But it is important to keep in mind throughout all of this that gun violence doesn’t just happen when you see it on the news. There aren’t always a handful of victims at a time. Since the Newtown shootings, the U.S. has averaged 18 gun deaths per day. That’s a total of more than 400 in less than a month. Mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary catch people off guard because they are so violent and seem out of place. People say, “This wasn’t supposed to happen here.” But then where is violent gun murder “supposed” to happen? We are privileged to feel so disconnected from gun violence when actually for some, it is a gruesome frequent reality.
If 18 people a day were dying from plane crashes or roller coasters or food poisoning, the government would intervene, doing everything possible to bring that number down. Why should death by gun warrant a different reaction?
— Lindsay Lee is a senior in mathematics. She can be reached at [email protected].
