By Meagan Ginnaty-Moore
It’s no secret that America is in love with guns, when we have one of the highest gun violence rates among the developed world. I guess that’s what people mean when they chant proudly that America is No. 1! It’s not in math, science, happiness – it’s guns!
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) has data showing that the annual average incident of gun violence (homicide, suicide, unintentional shooting, police intervention, and undetermined intent) from 2011 until 2015 was 33,880, with a daily average of 93. What’s more is that according to a study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) with data from 2013, the U.S. accounts for 82 percent of all firearm deaths among the 32 countries studied, a fact that one researcher on the team called “eye-popping,” when talking to The Trace, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence in America. (They’ve already accounted for 3,944 incidences of gun violence as of Jan. 25, 2017.)
Thanks academics, us Americans already know we’re the best at everything – as long as it fires a bullet!
However, we all know the best state in the union is Wisconsin! This great state had a rating of a C- on gunlawscorecard.org Cs get degrees, right? A C- is totally acceptable when talking about a hunk of metal that can and does kill and/or injure hundreds and thousands of people in America every day. Not only that it’s super easy to get a gun, and as they should be when all these grizzly bears are attacking schools (just an alternative fact from our soon-to-be new U.S. Secretary of Education for you).
Okay, so maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe in some crazy, topsy turvy world gun control does work. I wonder what that would look like; maybe it would look like Australia’s gun laws.
In 1996 John Howard, a conservative politician and former prime minister of Australia passed gun control laws after a mass shooting that, as every majorly reported mass shooting in America does, shook the country to its core. However, it couldn’t have possibly worked – oh wait, it did. There have been zero mass shootings since 1996 in Australia. Before that there were about 13 mass shooting in the 18 years prior to 1996, which adds up to about one every year. Homicide rates involving guns dropped. Youth suicide involving guns dropped.
But this is the United States of America, not Australia, and we have the Second Amendment! Any regulation would interfere with my constitutional rights! This is a country founded on the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!
Though, are we really the country of life, liberty and happiness with a gun at our hip? The fear inducing, fast-firing, family tearing, firearm is what makes us liberated? Is that what makes us happy. The thing that takes life from humans is what gives this country life?
Maybe, just maybe, gun control is worth trying, for the sake of the ideals on which this number one country was founded.