Student Opinion: How Much Longer do Our Kids Have to Suffer Gun Violence

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The school shooting has become a morbid phenomenon that takes place across the United States and plagues this nation. As CNN pointed out, the US has 57 times as many school shootings as its developed peers combined, and there is nearly one school shooting every week in 2019. More and more kids are losing their lives on campus. It is a disaster not only to a family but also to the whole country.

As a result, schools across the country have to prepare for this horrible eventuality. Many schools hire armed school resource officers to encounter active shooters. Most states passed laws requiring schools to conduct lockdown or emergency drill to keep students safe from intruders. These preparations have become a new part of our children’s educational experience. It is not normal and insane as the school shootings.

This April, more than a dozen school districts involving more than one hundred schools in Colorado were closed due to a credible threat from a teenager with a gun. Though this accident ended up with no casualty, it illustrates that the bad people have already won and we actually have been defeated in this battle against gun violence. This country’s weak gun laws are unable to stop evil people from killing and the government has no desire to change it. So, all the schools across the country can do is lockdown and shutdown, and all those innocent students can do is sheltering in place, ducking for cover and running for life. I think this is a big shame on this country and a tremendous sorrow to the whole society.

We are suffering gun violence because under the existing permissive gun laws with many loopholes, we have too many guns in this country and bad people can access guns too easily. Also, numerous research and evidence from both other countries and domestic states have proven that strict gun law can reduce gun violence effectively.

Therefore, as a common sense, we need to tighten our gun laws and make up these loopholes. Shamefully and unfortunately, some politicians in Washington are reluctant to make any change legislatively to stem this problem. They take money donation from the NRA, the largest gun lobby group who is against any common sense gun control law, as a source of their political campaign funding.They also take votes from this big group which has nearly 5 million members.  In return, they dare not to offend the NRA, nor put their political future in risk.  Consequently, any common sense gun law, such as a universal back ground check or the ban of assault weapon, is not passed at the republican-controlled Congress.

After so many years of rampant gun violence, still, little or nothing has been done to stop it at the national level. Instead, they dwell on tangential issues like the mental health, the hardening of school safety, and the arming school teachers. These proposals either only address symptoms but not root causes, or make school shootings worse and more complicated. Without strict gun laws, our kids will suffer from school shootings for a long, long time.

The common interest of politics bind the NRA and the Republicans together. As long as the Republicans still dominates the Congress and Trump is still in charge of the White House, we can’t hold any hope for common sense gun laws.  Our beloved former President Abraham Lincoln declared that America should be built upon “that government of the people, by the people, for the people….” When a government can’t or has no desire to keep its people safe from gun violence, we, the people, have the rights to change it.  Therefore, we need to publicize the truth about gun violence and vote for those who are for strict gun laws.  We do this for our kids, our families, our country and ourselves. We can’t let those students’ death go in vain again and again.