02/27/2018

On December 14, 2012, I was a sophomore in high school. My heart instantaneously sank to my stomach and tears rolled down my face as I turned on the TV to read the CNN headline, “Shooting at Connecticut Elementary School.” Last Wednesday, February 14, 2018, I glanced at a tweet stating, “17 Dead, 15 Hurt in Florida High School Massacre” as I scrolled through my feed. I shook my head in despair for a brief moment, but I kept scrolling and I went on with my day. Later that evening when I decided to delve further into the latest American school shooting, something occurred to me: I have become desensitized to gun violence in my own country.

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It would appear that we as Americans have a routine when it comes to mass shootings: a mass shooting occurs, people turn to social media to send their condolences, debate on social media regarding guns and gun legislation, everyone forgets, and congress fails to act – just in time for another mass shooting to occur. As we grow increasingly desensitized to these types of events, our brains begin to produce less of a response, constantly allowing for this cycle to reoccur. This leads to the pressing question: “where do we go from here?”

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There is undoubtedly a concern regarding mental illness, which is a task that needs to be tackled in order to reduce the likelihood of another mass shooting. When addressing the nation days following the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary, President Obama stated, “The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people. It’s not the only country that has psychosis. Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country on Earth that would put up with this.” If we’re seeing mass shootings occur at an impeccable rate in the United States, but not elsewhere, how do we so often jump to the conclusion that mental illness is the independent variable? He later emphasized, “We kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyone else.” President Obama’s comments were right on par, and yet again more relevant than ever.

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According to data presented in a 2015 study at the University of Alabama by Adam Lankford, Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but account for 42 percent of the world’s guns. An overwhelming 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide have been American from 1966 to 2012. Lankford’s study included only countries with populations greater than 10 million, and demonstrated that behind Yemen, the United States has the second-most mass shootings worldwide. Referring to the same study, the New York Times reported, “Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country.” The U.S. is in a quandary when it comes to the gun debate, but it ultimately boils down to one thing: our culture. The U.S. government has failed its people cyclically on this issue, like in instances when 49 people were killed and 53 wounded by a man that had been investigated by the FBI for potential terroristic activity was able to legally purchase his weapons of choice. Throughout history we have seen countries like Great Britain and Australia take action and produce positive results through legislation following fatal gun violence, yet America continues to make negligible effort in lessening the possibility of a gun getting in the hands of the wrong person.

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Since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, there have been at least 1,607 mass shootings, with approximately 1,846 people killed and 6,459 wounded, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a database that has tracked events since 2013 in which four or more people (not counting the shooter) were shot at the same general time and location. When reviewing these figures, the emotional numbness begins to settle in once again. To imagine that nearly two thousand innocent people have lost their lives in a relatively short period of time due to gun violence is unsettling. How many times are we going to repeat the mass shooting cycle before true progress is made?