I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to write this blog thing. We were told to tie it to current events, so like any good millennial, I jumped on Google. The first thing that came up in my search for news was an article about yet another shooting in the states.
This one was in California. A man shot four other people and then himself. Why? Who knows. The police think something happened to upset the man and apparently it was pretty bad to kill four people and then end his own life. They assume all these people are connected.
The man with the gun and his wife showed up at a trucking company, where the man shot two men and then his wife. Then he travelled to a home and killed a 57-year-old man and his 32-year-old daughter.
About 30 people saw this happen.
This isn’t the first shooting I’ve heard about this month. This isn’t the first shooting I’ve heard about this week.
Remember when someone went into Columbine with a list of names and murdered a bunch of high school kids? Why wasn’t gun control talked about then?
What about Sandy Hook? When seven-year-olds were gunned down in their classrooms? Why wasn’t gun control talked about then?
Parkland? The Waffle House Shooting? Sante Fe High School in Texas? Las Vegas?
Where is the gun control? Kids are dying. People are dying.
I follow a lot of those Parkland kids on Twitter. The ones that started the March For Our Lives movement. You’ve probably seen them on Ellen, or on the cover of TIME magazine. They’re out there, between the ages of 16 and 18-years-old and they’re doing more for gun control than the President.
If you look at Japan, they have so many layers of laws on top of each other. They have to pass a mental health evaluation, a written test, shoot with 95 per cent accuracy in a test, and in-depth background checks. They can only buy air-rifles and shotguns. They rarely see more than 10 gun deaths in a year.
Look at Australia, they had one mass shooting in 1996, the government stepped in, ran a buy-back program and put in some real laws. No mass shootings since.
I don’t know why people take guns in and end lives when they get mad about losing a video game. I just can’t help but think that a background check, a mental health examination, not having such disgustingly easy access to guns would be a first step, wouldn’t it?
I hate looking through news sites and seeing shootings on a weekly basis. I hate that I watched an interview with a girl from Texas and she said she’d been waiting for this.
A girl I went to high school with was in Las Vegas when a shooter, who had a perfectly legal semi-automatic weapon and a bump stock, shot into the crowd at a concert and killed 58 people and injured more than 800 others.
I went to a music festival in Washington a couple years ago. Before I left, my dad had to talk with me about what to do if someone opened fire while I was there.
I hate logging onto news sites and reading about the lives senselessly lost to such violent actions. Something needs to be done. There has to be regulations put into place. There has to be something we can do.
