44 days, 1,056 hours, 63,360 minutes and 18 school shootings since January 1, 2018. That’s almost one school shooting every two days. If this isn’t alarming enough, Wednesday’s Florida high school shooting lead to the deaths of 17 innocent students and faculty members so far. With at least another 15 injured, this school shooting was worse than Columbine.
The shooter was a former student of the high school. Again, we sit here and ask ourselves how did another mentally ill person get their hands on a weapon that’s sole purpose is to kill? How did the FBI manage to miss the reports on YouTube comments about the suspect who years ago spoke of becoming a school shooter? We ask ourselves these questions every day it seems like. I mean that is probably because we don’t have a choice but to think about these things every day when we open up Twitter to find out that another mass shooting has occurred.
Sure, there’re rumors that the shooter was a “Dreamer”. And we love to go and on about every time an African American fires a gun with intent to harm others. But that isn’t the problem here. The guy who killed 59 and injured another 800 plus people who had come together to enjoy music? He was white. The color of someone’s skin or their country of origin is not what is taking innocent people’s lives.
The Second Amendment is a pretty heated topic right now, I wonder why? Sure, massive gun violence like this hasn’t been a huge problem in the past, so why have these mass shootings in the U.S. blown up over the last three decades?
A lot of people also like to point fingers at media like movies and video games as a cause of these outbreaks. While they may have some toll psychologically, there are larger issues at hand, like how kids are getting their hands on semi-automatic weapons, when it comes to mass shootings.
Sure, maybe let’s not alter the Constitution. But I’m sorry at this time you can’t look someone in the eye and truthfully tell them that America doesn’t have a gun problem. There are still states with weak background checks and not nearly enough oversight over gun sales and requirements to own a gun. Guns aside, we, as a country, need to support those with mental illnesses to help prevent practically daily shootings. We need to support them and provide them with the adequate help and resources that they need to help prevent them from participating in gun violence.
You can’t log onto social media without seeing another headline including gun violence on any given day. And we’re not just talking school shootings-it’s the music festivals, the subways and the everyday areas like parks that millions of people use daily. America, enough is enough. When are we going to wake up and realize the only way for us to stop these tragic events is to spread awareness, love and to take action against gun violence? As a country, we need to support each other and most importantly spread love to all those around us.