THE NEW GENERATION AND GETTING RID OF GUNS
In a recent Geography lecture we were looking at the topic of power; who controls it and has influence over it, the scope, longevity and ability to maintain that power. The lecturer showed us a video clip of the students who started the #NeverAgain movement and there was a moment where I got goosebumps all over my body. There was a moment of true realisation that America prioritises the inherent right of gun ownership over the lives of innocent children.
The #NeverAgain movement began after the mass shooting of seventeen staff and students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a 19-year-old former student on the 14th February 2018. I won't pretend that whilst this was broadcast on the news I almost dismissed the case as just another US mass shooting. The thought of that alone is horrifying. That so many innocent teachers and students have been killed in one of the most developed countries in the world, and I can be as disrespectful to not give it a second thought, as if it were just a new movie being released. The level of desensitisation shows just how commonplace tragedies like this have become. In my lecture, it was the clips of the 20 students who survived the shooting and started the movement that snapped me back into the reality that these are real lives. Not only are they real people with real lives, the most disbelieving part of it all is that it would take a small number of people in positions of power, fewer than the number of students attending Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, to say that enough is enough and change the laws of gun ownership [1].
Of course other factors come into play, such as mental health care, the influence of social media and the ease of communication between extremists, but it is the level of gun ownership that has been clearly proven over and over again to be a causal link to mass shootings. Gun ownership is something I cannot even fathom as a UK citizen, the thought has rarely crossed my mind. The idea of feeling unsafe in my own educational environment with student searches checking for weapon possession is something from another world. In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. Japan's population is one third of the size of America's but in the same year guns were involved in only 13 deaths. This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s [2]. This could be due to the fact that it is much easier to obtain a gun in America. There is almost a feeling that anyone has the inherent right to own a gun, not just for sport but for the purpose of self-defence. The idea that someone should be able to protect their family and apparently this is best done when owning and having the ability to use a gun. The intrinsic nature of this philosophy in American culture could be why there is such opposition to changes in the law.
But why can't one president just change the goddamn law I hear you cry?!! How many shootings and deaths of children is it going to take for someone to be like huh maybe there should be some kind of legislation to prevent this from happening? Currently, any attempt to create new laws has been blocked by congress. Take Obama for example, although he was able to strengthen laws already in place and worked to reduce gun violence by focusing on mental health treatment, limiting magazine sizes, strengthening background checks and restarting federal gun research that had been frozen for years, congress did not budge when it came to writing new laws to restrict the ownership of firearms [3].
This video shows Obama's passion for the issue:
And now we're stuck with this (Trump - need I say anything more?):
^^ actually let me rephrase: America VOTED in this
So if the president can't stop mass shootings then what possible could we do? This question could have been posed to the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, but what did they respond with? These teens created their own movement to change the way an entire society thinks; their attitude towards guns, self-defence and they've reminded us that it is in our power to help stop children getting killed. The #NeverAgain movement has raised awareness, its educated, its empowered, its made people stop and think and made sure that mass shootings should no longer be considered the norm. Even if congress won't protect our children, the coming generation is going to change how guns are perceived. In the words of Obama:
"weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don't belong on our streets".
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