Gun violence in America has been relevant for years and continues to become more relevant by the day. Guns have become part of American society as well as the main topic of many political debates. While my final presentation prefaced this subject, I'd like to dive deeper into the issue.
Whenever the topic of gun violence comes up, everyone always refers to the second amendment. It states, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." While about a third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun, people decide to understand this in one of two ways. One, they focus on, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," understanding it in the way that every individual has the right to bear their own firearm as a constitutional right. Two, people emphasize, "A well regulated Militia," referring to local, state, and federal legislative bodies and not the individual.
That leads me to two important court cases that weighed more on one side of the debate than the other. In the United States v. Miller case in 1939, where Jack Miller and Frank Layton were charged when transporting a sawed-off double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun in interstate commerce, the Supreme Court concluded that holding the Second Amendment does not guarantee an individual the right to keep and bear a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. This is because the shotgun doesn't have a reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia. This led Congress to be more strict on the receipt, possession, and transportation of firearms.
This was until 2008 when the topic was revisited in the case of District of Colombia v. Heller. This case referred more to the individual in light of self-defense. Heller was a police officer who was authorized to carry a handgun while on duty, and after applying for a one-year handgun license to keep at home and his request is denied, he sued the District of Colombia. The U.S. Court said that the Second Amendment protected his right to keep a firearm at home for self-defense, and the District of Colombia's requirement that firearms kept at home needed to be nonfunctional went against that.
With all the debate around guns in America, it doesn't come as a surprise that gun violence is so evident. Not only by mass shootings, but by homicide, suicide, and even accidental shootings.
At the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, the deadliest mass murder in United States history up to that point took place. Sixteen people were killed and thirty-one were wounded by a bolt action rifle and semiautomatic weapons. Now, the deadliest mass murder is the one I've already mentioned, the Las Vegas, Nevada shooting in 2017. Fifty-eight were killed and five hundred forty-six were injured in the country music festival, where people were supposed to be enjoying their time.
We're continuing to see shootings all over the news, and while people were saying that Covid slowed down the rate of the shootings, numbers are still seen increasing. The video above was from just 10 days ago.
When it comes to mass shootings in schools, like the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, a lot can be learned. Mass shootings in schools are more rare events in comparison to other gun violence issues, but they leave an intense impact on every aspect of the school, their families, and community life. It leaves behind trauma, depression, grief, and heartache. And it's all initiated by the access to the gun. Of course, the shooter is going through their own struggles and thoughts that lets them begin to think of pursuing something like this, but the access to the gun gives it the opportunity to become a reality. That is why it is so important that from a young age, kids should be learning gun safety and being informed of the things that are difficult to hear about.
And to put it in retrospect, mass shootings, as often as they seem to happen, make up the smallest portion of all gun violence.
Suicide makes up the largest portion of all gun violence. More than sixty percent of gun deaths each year are by suicide, and three percent of hospital visits each year are due to a nonfatal gunshot wound from a suicide attempt. The easy access that so many people have to guns takes away a second chance of life for someone who is struggling. When you take the firearm out of the equation, only four percent of suicide attempts actually result in death, and in comparison, ninety percent of gun suicide attempts result in death. Around 24,000 Americans die each year from gun suicide, including more than 3,100 young people and 4,400 veterans, with an average of 64 deaths a day, and it only increases every year.
Moving on to homicides, which result in almost as many deaths as suicides, there are multiple aspects to approach it from. Firearm homicide rates are 25.2 times higher than other industrialized countries. In the past decade, 126,292 Americans died due to this reason, more than twice as many Americans as were killed in the Vietnam war. Different factors to this large statistic that increase the risk of gun violence include adverse childhood experiences, access to guns, access to alcohol, domestic violence, economic inequality, exposure to violence, trauma, and the list goes on and on.
Adding the access to a gun into an equation of things such as domestic violence leads to increased rates of homicide. Half of the women murdered by their current or former partners are killed by a firearm. Women are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser when their abuser has access to a gun.
Gun violence doesn't just happen. There are reasons that fuel it. According to this article, structural inequalities are caused by racist policies that target communities of color and create segregated and underinvested neighborhoods. Discrimination, income inequality, poverty, underfunded public housing, under-resourced public service, lack of opportunity and perceptions of hopelessness, and easy access to guns all fuel gun violence.
When choosing to own a gun for your own safety and for self-defense, take extra steps of precaution. Make sure you understand how to keep you and those around you safe. It is not rare that kids find guns in the home, like the Sandy Hook shooting, and fire it not knowing any better. If one aquires a gun for safety reasons, you have to be safe with the gun itself.
It has become too easy to have a gun in hand. To care for our community and our future generations, change needs to happen.
Final Blog Post
Karmina Ghobrial, #9
"Mass shootings in schools are more rare events in comparison to other gun violence issues" -- not nearly rare enough, in the US. That just reflects how out-of-control "other gun violence issues" are here.
ReplyDeleteGood report.