On February 14th, 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It’s a story you’ve heard a hundred times in last few months, which is strange when you think about it. It seems every other mass shooting is met with calls to “not make a tragedy political” and then forgotten about until the next mass shooting a month later. It hasn’t even been a year since the deadliest mass shooting in history occurred in Las Vegas, and it’s almost never brought up. What makes Parkland so different?
The big thing with Parkland is that the people speaking out and demanding gun control are the victims themselves. Its way harder to defend your precious guns in the face of children who were almost killed by one. There are finally people telling our lawmakers that thoughts and prayers aren’t good enough, that they can’t just sit on their NRA donations while they wait for this to blow over – that the people want change. They say it’s a mental health problem, but they refuse to close the loophole that lets mentally ill people buy guns. Background checks are pointless when anyone deemed a “private-seller” is allowed to sell a gun to anyone they want, all completely legally.
Extending background checks to include private sellers is a huge step in the right direction to stop people who shouldn’t own guns from doing just that. If you’re mentally sound and you don’t have a criminal record then I have great news: this wouldn’t stop you from buying or owning a gun in any way whatsoever. Nobody is trying to take your guns; we just want to go to school and not have to worry about getting shot.
One of the biggest arguments I hear goes something like “People get run over by cars all the time, do you want car control too?” and it’s a fair point. Imagine if you needed to prove you were capable of driving safely in order to get a license to drive. Or even worse, if there were limits on how fast you could drive or where you could drive. I can’t imagine that happening in America. Another classic is “Criminals will get guns anyway.” We should make murder legal too, since people are going to do it anyway. There should just be no laws at all since they all get broken by criminals, if we’re being honest.
My point is, nobody wants to ban all guns, we just want gun control that’s common sense and exists in almost every other developed country on the planet.