The Orlando Shooting was our country’s worst mass shooting in modern history. The millennial generation has lived through at least 50 shootings that span all over the country and the direst result of it all is that this generation is becoming numb. Thanks to the rising gun violence in America, a shooting will pop up on television or Internet and it won’t shock people anymore.
These shootings are happening too often and no change is occurring within our system to fix the problem. Mass shootings are not the biggest contributors to yearly deaths in the United States. It is the amount of gun violence in general that have heightened statistics. Mass shootings as well as individual shootings are often targeted towards younger people of color. These kinds of people are not being represented, but rather marginalized by those in our government that can make the change. You would think that young children being killed at Sandy Hook or Columbine would really open eyes, but it hasn’t.
The Trace tells us that at a rate of more than twice a day, someone under 18 has been shot and killed, which makes for at least 756 American children killed by gunfire in the last year.
According The New York Times, death rate from gun homicides is about 31 per million people, which is about 27 people shot dead every day of the year. This includes all types of shootings. Compared to the rest of the world, the United States has an irregularly higher number of gun violence deaths. The United States has almost five times as many gun homicides than other developed and populated countries.
For example, the New York Times says that being killed with a gun in Germany is about as likely as dying of contact with a thrown or falling object in the United States. Being killed with a gun in New Zealand is as likely as dying from falling off a ladder in the United States. In many other countries, gun homicides are a very rare occurrence, yet in the ‘land of the free, it happens more frequently than any other part of the world.
We are also blaming gun violence to those who are foreign and not U.S. citizens, but much greater deaths amount from violence within our borders by our people. According to The Trace, from 2005-2015, 71 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, while 301,797 were killed by gun violence during the same period.
Gun violence in America stems from the ease of accessibility. Sales of guns are increasing exponentially and to buy a gun in the United States barely requires a background check. With no regulation or gun control, tragic events will keep on happening.
According to The Trace, the Chicago police have been taking one illegal gun off the street every 74 minutes. If that is how often we have to take away guns, then we should consider why these people are accessing guns so easily and so quickly. With all of these statistics, the 114th Congress is still not doing anything to address the gun issue. Rather than offering more and more moments of silences, we should be honoring all of our gun violence victims and striving to make a change.
