Let’s send some belated Valentine’s day greetings and Chinese New Year love to everyone, but especially to the students, faculty, families, and the entirety of the Parkland, Florida community. How about we send this love nation-wide? Say, to the families of the two, now deceased, and the 17 injured students in Benton, Kentucky? Or even to the individuals both injured and killed in Philly, Italy (Texas), Winston-Salem, Sierra Vista, Oxon Hill, Los Angeles, and St. Johns. Let’s consider the kids, teens, and adults now traumatized by gun violence in New York, Gentilly, Marshall, San Bernardino, Seattle, Dearborn, Mobile, Maplewood, Denison and too many other places to list. Maybe there hasn’t technically been 18 mass school shootings in the U.S. since 2018 (thank goodness for that), but there have been 18 reported incidents of reckless gun use too deep within the public sphere, and if you’re too stubborn to believe that, then you’ve found the issue. But no, this is not a gun problem, to the very core this is a people problem. Did I strike a chord in some of you?
Here’s a little bit of trivia for all of you who bleed red, white, and blue: How long ago was the Bill of Rights written? For reference:
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We’ve had two World Wars
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The Wright Brothers took flight
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Lydia Child was born
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Women won the right to vote
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Humans went to space
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Donald Trump won the presidency
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and the iPhone was created.
So the answer, 226 years ago. About 22 decades ago, Americans were given the “right to bare arms” and that was amazing. To have the comfort in knowing you could protect yourself freely and to the best of your ability was probably the coolest thing to happen for Americans at the time.
Another cool thing that happened almost 170 years after that, the AR-15 was invented. Yes, the assault rifle. Our founding fathers probably knew that guns would change over time, however I don’t think they took into consideration that although our weapons are advancing, our laws are not.
However, I’d like to think that those founding fathers were a compassionate bunch of guys. I’m sure that had they known Alyssa, Scott, Martin, Nicholas Aaron, Jamie, Chris, Luke, Cara, Gina, Joaquin, Alaina, Meadow, Helena, Alex, Carmen, and Peter, that they would be hesitant to argue the fact that the 2nd Amendment is outdated. Actually, they probably would’ve realized that it’s outdated in 2016, after 36,358 people in the U.S. had died of gun violence, and then maybe more of the world would’ve had the opportunity to know these 17 victims and so many others. So let’s stop placing blame when one is controlled by the other. A person, Nikolas Cruz, killed these people. Adam Lanza, a living, breathing human (at the time) ended 28 lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Stephen Paddock took his own life after stealing 58 others in Las Vegas. 30+ US Senators (all human last we checked) voted against gun reform, and they were able to do this because in the end it’s up to people and not guns.