Every single day someone dies here in America due to guns, whether it is by suicide, school shootings, or just even children playing around at home with an open gun at home. (Truth is we need laws and systems like this). It is a way we can reduce the number of killings by guns in our country that happen on an everyday basis. Although the individuals in the class may not have suicidal thoughts, there are many other people who do have to endure a daily struggle of debating whether or not to take their own life away. Whether we believe it or not, our youth is killing themselves and the leading way is by guns.
Gun laws pertaining to schools prevent people from saving more lives and stopping shootings in the making. The Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 goes down in history as the worst school shooting in U.S history. Seung-Hui killed “32 unarmed students on the campus of Virginia Tech” (McGrath), taking his time to go through the building as he “had no expectation that a fellow student or a faculty member might shoot back”(McGrath) thanks to Virginia Tech’s gun-free zone. If Virginia Tech hadn’t had that law, people like Tracy Bridges would have had their guns on them, saving some students that could be alive today “instead of having to sprint to their cars in distant parking lots.” (McGrath).The same happened in1997 when Luke Woodham, then 16, used and action rifle to kill two students and wound seven others at his high school in Pear, Mississippi. Joel Myrick heard the shots and sprinted to get his .45 that was “Prohibited by law” (McGrath) onto campus.
Researchers at Harvard studies the relationship between firearm availability and the deaths of children 5-14 years old. Out of that age group, 6,817 children were killed by firearms between 1988 and 1997. They also found out that death rates were highest in states where firearms were most accessible. Every so often a story will pop up on the news saying, “Kid shoots dad” or “Child accidentally shoots himself. Whats the easiest way to have stories like these stop popping up?
MeShelle Locke 16, of Lacey, Washington was suspended from school for four days for making a hand gesture of a gun at another student and saying “Bang.” The boy whom MeShelle often joked with asked “Is that a threat” jokingly. She replied “No, that’s a promise.” This prank resulted in, out of school suspension. So has gun laws changed after the Columbine shooting on April 20, 1999? Here’s a few facts: May 1999 | In the wake of the Columbine shootings, Congress holds heated gun-control debates. Then-Vice President Al Gore cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to require background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and
Every day eight American children and teenagers die from gun violence. Which totals up to more than 29,00 American children and teens dying each year just in the United States alone. Handguns and other fire arms carried into schools across the country are just waiting to end in disaster. School shootings increase every decade since the 1960s. According to the U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education, there were four targeted school shootings in the 1970s, five in the 1980s, twenty-eight in the 1990s, and according to the article “Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings” as of June 1, 2010 there has been twenty-five so far in the 2000s.
It is said that 13-17 children are killed every day by firearms, when since 1903 the number of fatal gun accidents is at its lowest. The number of children per day is based on counting’s that include older teenagers and people in their twenties; when counting actual children (14 years and under) the daily death rate is 2.6 and for children ten and under it is 0.4 per day, far lower than children that are killed by drunk driving incidents, drowning, or many other causes (Kopel,
On April 16, 2007, a senior at Virginia Tech named Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others on the campus before committing suicide. On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. 12 people were killed and 58 others were injured. Most recently, on December 14, 2012, a man named Adam Lanza shot 20 children and six staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. These are only a few of the mass shootings that have occurred recently in the past and have sparked debate about the controversial topic of gun control.
Gun Control On December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, twenty year old Adam Lanza walked into the elementary school with a gun. He shot and killed 26 people, 20 of which were children, using a semi-automatic fire arm. In 2007 at Virginia Tech, a senior at the school, walked into the school and killed 32 people with a semi-automatic weapon. Both of these tragic events were caused by a single gunman with a gun in an educational facility. Both of these events sparked many debates on the topic of guns and how to stop these events from happening.
A recent article states that about 77% of students have admitted to being the victim of a bully. The American Justice Department bullying statistics show that one out of every four kids will be bullied at some time by their adolescence (Bullying Statistics, 2013). One of the most unfortunate parts of these school bullying statistics is that in about 85% of bullying cases, no intervention or effort is made by a teacher or faculty member of the school to stop the bullying from taking place (Bullying Statistics, 2013). The consequences of bullying are numerous. Children are facing physical and emotional damage.
It is estimated that about 10000 children are either injured or killed due to gunshot wound every year. “Injuries from firearms send an estimated 7,000 kids to the ER every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds before they can get to a hospital, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.” (Culp-Ressler, 2014) This injuries and