As a student, I have countless things on my mind so the last thing I want to have in the back of my mind is the idea that I could be a victim of a mass school shooting because of insufficient gun control laws. To prevent future shootings, we need to improve our gun control laws. First off, people who are mentally unstable people shouldn’t be able to have any type of gun whatsoever. Think about this for a second: why should we allow a person who can never fully control their actions to own a gun, a weapon that can very easily to cause harm to others with?
Today, the effects of mentally unstable people owning guns are very clear and deadly. One example is the Parkland shooting, a fairly recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The shooter had previously made threats against the lives of fellow students,he was recommended an involuntary admission by psychiatrists to attend a treatment center, and there were snapchats found of him cutting his wrists. All of these details are signs of the shooter not being mentally stable. Even with this questionable background, the shooter was still able to obtain an Assault Riffle (AR)-15, which led to the deadliest high school shooting in United States history. I believe that if there was a law that stated that mentally unstable people couldn’t own a gun, then this shooting, along with future shootings, could’ve and can still be prevented.
Another big issue with our country’s gun control laws is that anybody, with few exceptions such as convicted felons, can buy an AR. It’s so easy to buy an AR that someone can go to a gun store and if they have completed the paperwork, they can walk out of the store in under an hour with an AR and multiple magazines of ammo. This is unacceptable. We can’t allow people to buy a gun that has the potential to be as deadly as an AR, period. I understand that there are people who support AR’s for sport, but that is a completely different argument as I’m saying no one should be allowed to own an AR because of their risk of involvement in a mass shooting.
Even though I don’t believe in citizens owning assault rifles, I still agree with the second amendment that people should be allowed to own a firearm to be able to protect themselves; “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” However, I believe that these firearms should be non lethal in the effort to stop mass shootings. An example of an effective, non lethal firearm that would take down a home invader is a tranquilizer gun.
To make sure that all students including myself feel safe at school, I propose a plan to create more gun control laws to even have a chance to stop these shootings from happening. Eliminating the risk of the mentally ill owning a gun and stopping common citizens from being allowed to own AR’s will hopefully prevent some of these horrible shootings from happening. If these gun control laws were to be passed, it would allow students to start to feel safer at school: our second home, and the place we spend most of our time for nine months out of a year.
