The Future of Gun Control

Many will call the events in Connecticut a tragic accident, or a horrible tragedy, but those descriptions are beating around the bush.  This was a senseless massacre of innocent life.  What makes it even worse is the fact that this is the 16^th such mass shooting event in the United States this year.  Those 16 shootings have left 84 people dead.  The question is, how many more people must be brutally murdered before legislators do anything?

Shooting killed 26 people in Connecticut

The time has come for some sanity on gun control.  The facts show that more guns correlate with more homicides (Harvard School of Public Health), just as the fact that states that have tighter gun laws have fewer gun related deaths (Richard Florida).   We as a country need to stop lying to ourselves that guns make us safer and finally get some results in gun control to ensure the safety of our population and ensure that such terrible killings will not happen again.

 

Many would argue that the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms.  However, the very same document we uphold to be the law of the land and the reason why gun control should not be enacted once contained provisions upholding the enslavement of human beings, counting African Americans as three-fifths of a person, didn't allow women to vote, and didn't allow direct election of officials even after a democratic revolution. 

Moreover, when the founding fathers wrote that United States citizens had a right to bear arms, they did not write a provision in the Bill of Rights that upheld the right to carry concealed weapons, have firearms with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, wear body armor, and shoot up a crowded elementary school.  The wide availability to guns that people now have in this country creates an environment that violates the basic tenant that our government is supposed to enforce: keep our citizens safe.

We urge  everyone to write to their representative and Senator to spur action on this particular issue.  We cannot afford to wait for the next tragedy for us to be influenced into action.