“When adults tell me I have the
right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your
student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.
[Crowd chants] Shame on you
They say a
good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are
just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no
laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred.
We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too
young to understand how the government works. We call BS.
[Crowd chants] Throw them out”
That
was the transcript from Emma Gonzalez’s now famous speech, We Call B.S..
For a continuous eleven minutes,
Gonzalez spoke about gun violence and how it affects the world today,
especially the teens “who don’t know what they’re talking about”. Gonzalez had
brought up several points about the gun control legislation being declined, and
more importantly, how the NRA funds many politicians to maintain power within
the government. It’s no longer about parties and beliefs, our government
officials rely on money for power, to flourish that inner greed that was taught
to everyone: “money gets you to places; money buys happiness”.
This
article isn’t going to be long for one reason, everything I want to say has
already been said, and no one is listening or will listen anytime soon. It’s as
if people don’t want to pay attention to the obscene rise is mass shootings.
There have been over 9,000 incidents just in the past two months relating to
gun violence. 9,000. There shouldn’t
be hesitation to a total gun ban or at least automatic weapons. Like Emma had
stated, these are senseless tragedies that have no place. We could have
eliminated this problem years ago. The first school shooting was in in 1764, when four Lenape Indians invaded a
school house and killed a teacher and approximately nine children. From there,
every decade from the 1840’s-on have had shootings in American schoolhouses. It
started at one, then three, to eight, and now a record of over 100 in the past
decade.
These
shootings are not simply getting more frequent, but also getting more deadlier.
Recorded,
2,000 plus people have died in a gun related accident in the 2018 year, 500 of
them being students. This isn’t acceptable. No student should have to die in an
environment where they’re to learn, where they are supposed to be safe. No
person should have to die.
The
first mass shooting took place in Philadelphia, 1949, after WWII. A 28-year-old
veteran, Howard Unrah, had become enraged after a series of events led to a bad
day. He was ready to see a blind date, but got stuck in traffic and his date
left. He was saddened and angry, stewing in his dark car until 3 am, where he
came home to find his apartment fence was broken by one of his neighbors. This
broke him. In the night, Unruh made a list of who he planned to shoot, people
who had wronged him, and the next day, he shot 13 people in a 20 minute period.
Once he was caught, it was discovered the Howard was “mentally unstable”. No
one had ever suspected the Veteran to do such a thing. Unrah was a gay man
living in the late-forties. He was an abnormal man to society, and he was open about
it to the psychologists that examined him. He also stated that he told his only
girlfriend that he was gay and she left him when he described himself as a
“schizo”.
This
goes to show that mass shootings have always been about rage and people who are
deemed different from the rest. And this also shows how the least suspecting
people are always the one who commit the crime. This was a respected man of the
country. So mental health and background checks won’t stop this. No one can
read minds. You just have to take all the guns away. I know many don’t believe
in this because “of their second amendment rights”, but here’s a reality check:
the second amendment was written for the militia, or the local army, not for the commoners. If you live in a dangerous area
where crime is high, then I understand if you have a pistol under your pillow
at night or if you abide by the open carry law. But we have a military defense,
we don’t need to protect ourselves with a rifle. And on that topic, hunting is not a sport, unless you actually depend
to the meat to survive (rural areas). If not, then you don’t need to have and
arsenal in your basement.
I know
this will take time, to even just change school policies, but I know we can get
there. Slowly, politicians will realize that the death toll is hurting their
career and they’ll want to do something about it. They might start with heavier
background checks and schools will probably have a guarded entrance where
everyone is searched. Then, possibly, certain guns will be banned and certain
people may not be able to get access to weapons anymore. Finally, the second
amendment is either changed or removed completely, and we won’t have to deal
with this issue anymore. But that’s in an ideal world. Years from now, I hope
the legislation will be changed all together because our generation will
finally have a say in what’s been going on. We will finally be able to show the
adults what we’ve been talking about, and maybe, it will stop for real.
All we
can do for now, is keep rallying and saying our piece, because every small
action leads into a big change.
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