Guns In America

I’m going to take a break today from writing about people with disabilities and differences and talk about guns. Following the Uvalde school mass shooting, parents now are worried about sending their children to school. When the school bus arrives, parents are now hugging their children as if for the last time because of the dread of what could happen after the parents put their children on that bus to take them to school. I have said this before and I will say it again: we elect our officials to give them the power to protect us and make our lives better, not just so they become narcissists and corrupt people who are held hostage by the gun lobby, and many of the elected people in our government have failed to do that by not passing stricter gun laws. 

People in America are now more likely to die by getting gunned down than any other cause of death. This country does not just have a mental health problem. This country, the land of the free and home brave, has a moral problem, and we must ask ourselves, “What is the right thing to do?” We have a gun problem and a power problem in our government. The gun problem is written in our Constitution, but the problem with that is that the right to bear arms was written more than two hundred years old when we were worried about being invaded by another country. Times are different now and guns are different now. They are far more advanced and far more deadly than they were two hundred years ago, and every gun owner knows that. 

Our government, no matter what sector of the government, needs to commission  research of what is historically the common denominator of mass shootings. For starters, I can already tell you just from watching the news that other than the Uvalde shooting, the shooter almost always seems to be a young white adult from a middle class family, and they always seem to do their bidding in warm months of the year. I have not heard of a shooting so far done by a young female adult from a wealthy family. So far this year alone, there have been nine mass shootings, not to mention the senseless neighbor killings that happen almost every weekend in major cities.

Schools were not meant to be built as fortresses. However, since we are in the middle of an epidemic of school shootings, I believe that schools should be built with bullet proof glass windows, should have cameras on all corners of the school, and not only a security guard, at least one police officer on duty at every school in America. This would also provide a lot of people with jobs. 

We elect people in this country to be authorities to protect us and make sure we have a good life. Our elected officials in this country need to start thinking about the people they serve by passing stricter gun laws so that parents aren’t afraid to put their kids on the school bus.