United States Gun Control
The morning of December 14th, 2012 began just like any regular day for the residents of
Newtown, Connecticut. People woke up and ate breakfast and then the employed adults left for work while enrolled students made their way to their schools. At Sandy Hook elementary school, morning arrivals went as scheduled and the doors were locked at 9:30 am. However, across town, began an incident which would forever impact the lives of millions. Twenty year old Adam Lanza shot and killed his fifty-two year old mother, then drove to Sandy Hook elementary school. At 9:35 am, Lanza used his mother’s semi-automatic rifle to shoot through the locked front doors of the school and immediately upon entering, he began his acts of sheer horror. Principal Dawn Hochsprung and the school’s psychologist, Mary Sherlach, heard the shots and rushed to the origin of the noise. They confronted Lanza but he fatally shot both of them. Before the principal was killed she turned on the school’s intercom to alert the other teachers that something was not right. Lanza then rushed to a first grade classroom where he killed the substitute teacher and fourteen of fifteen in the room, he then went to another grade one class where he killed the teacher, Victoria Leigh Soto, who put herself in front to protect them and six children. Many of the heroic teachers and staff in that building did everything they could in order to protect their students from Lanza. Between 9:46 and 9:49 am, he realized he was spotted by a police officer so he took his handgun and shot himself in the head, killing himself instantly, in all, there were twenty-eight fatalities including Lanza and his mother. This massacre was the third deadliest school shooting in United States history. However, mass shootings are not unique within the United States. On December 15th, 2012, Mother Jones, an
American Magazine, found that there have been sixty-two mass shootings since 1982, twenty- five of which have occurred since 2006. Ever since the Sandy Hook shootings, there has been an outcry from the public and pressure on Barrack Obama to implement gun control. This is the time for that to happen in the United States because of the high firearm violence rates, easy access to guns and ammunition and so the gun loving culture of the United States can be eliminated. When you have a country with a population as high as the United States’, which in 2011 according to the FBI was estimated to be 271,107,891, having a significant amount of crime is inevitable but since firearms have become a common tool within American society, the result is that they are very frequently seen within crimes. According to 2011 FBI statistics, 21.4% of all reported aggravated assaults in the United States involved a firearm and 41.1% of all reported robberies were committed with firearms being the main weapon. In 2011 there were 12,664 murders in the United States and 8,583 of them were caused by firearms. If firearms were harder to access, then either the number of each crime would drop and/or the severity would also fall. This is exemplified by the 2011 rates of gun homicide per 100,000 as published by the website GunPolicy.org. The United States saw their rate standing at 3.60, in comparison,
Canada’s was 0.50, Italy’s was 0.41, France’s was 0.23, Germany’s was 0.20, Australia’s was 0.13 and the United Kingdom had a rate of 0.03. All of those nations, besides the United States, have very strict gun laws and regulations. Thus, in order to lower the amount of annual murders in the United States by almost 68% and also decrease these other violent crime rates and total numbers of crime in the United States, firearm control must be implemented in order to restrict the accessibility of guns and ammunition.
From the time you hit the age of eighteen in America, there are very little restrictions as to the amount and type of weapons you purchase. According to an