Gun Control to Avoid School Shootings

Gun Control to Avoid School Shootings
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Abstract
School shootings have become a new norm in the United States with the most recent one being an attack perpetrated by a nineteen-year-old on a school in Florida. This has stirred a countrywide uproar about gun control and the lenient firearm laws in America. In every one hundred people in the United States, eighty-eight have guns making it the highest statistic in the world. The correlation between gun control laws and the number of shootings is quite evident leaving many in disquiet regarding the government’s reluctance to enforce gun control laws. The prevalent gun culture in America develops from its border expansion, innovative roots, and the Second Amendment. Gun control is an efficient way to end school shootings. When few people possess guns, the motivation to use them in restricted areas such as schools also goes down. This intelligence analysis paper contends that gun control can be used to end school shootings. It provides details about various laws on gun control and gives arguments and counter-arguments regarding the effectiveness of gun control as regards school shootings.
Keywords: Gun control, School Shooting, Second Amendment, Constitution, NRA
Gun Control to Avoid School Shootings
Recently, Florida experienced a series of events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a young man-Nikolas Cruz, at the age of nineteen, decided to kill seventeen students, staff members, and injuring several others with a gun.

The police without incident just a mile from the crime scene apprehended Cruz. The AR-15 gun he used was legally acquired and even the family he lived with was aware of this. Students at the Florida high school had seen the shooting coming, and some who had interacted with Cruz as he lived at his friend’s house had previously mentioned that he would be the one to blow up the school. This is not the first and will probably not be the last case of a school shooting in the United States.
Cases of school shootings have claimed countless young American lives, and yet the country still has the most lenient legislation on gun control. The correlation between gun control laws and the number of shootings is quite evident leaving many in disquiet regarding the government’s reluctance to enforce gun control laws. Of course, guns are not the only weapons of murder available but they without a doubt facilitate many killings, both within and without schools. The slightest effort to restrict the acquisition of such lethal weapons would be more effective than barely any restrictions. This would perhaps limit the use of deadly weapons by people like Cruz who are mentally unstable.
The US constitution should not act as a defense in the gun control argument. People who formulated the bill of rights, the Federalists who included John Adams and Washington, were against the introduction of a Bill of Rights arguing that it would limit the rights of the US citizens to the ones published in the Bill. According to this fraction of “founding fathers,” individuals could only get a firelock musket, and due to that fact that many people venture in farming, they considered necessary the riffles for security purposes and to hunt (Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence, 2016). Decades later, this same constitution makes it possible for a person to walk into a gun store and purchase a lethal assault rifle without any prerequisite licensing or background check. In my opinion, Madison had no conception regarding the semi-automatic rifles and how destructive they were in 1791 upon the enactment of the Second Amendment.
In the endeavor to ensure that schools provide a safe learning environment, the US government needs to abolish the NRA (National Rifle Association) to prevent incidences of school shootings, reduce the vulnerability of innocent students to gunmen, minimize the damage resulting from school shootings, and assist survivors in the process of recovery from the terror. Recently President Donald Trump, an outright opposing party to gun control, claimed that gun violence in American schools could be addressed by ensuring that all teachers were armed. This idea has not been received well by the general public as well as the students who took it to the streets to protest against the NRA. Teachers have shown little interest in carrying guns to school as no evidence links school safety to teachers being in possession of firearms.
Gun control is an efficient way to end school shootings. Australia is a perfect example of how effective gun control can be. The mass shooting that took place in 1996, which claimed thirty-five lives, and left twenty-three other people severely wounded was enough to instigate the strict legislation against firearms in the country. Policymakers in Australia responded by banning ownership of some kinds of weapons like shotguns, automatic, and semiautomatic rifles. The government led a gun buyback program, which resulted in the confiscation of over six hundred and fifty guns. A registry was further established for all the guns and a permit was offered to all guns procured. From research, Evidence provided by the Harvard Injury Control Research Centre, it is evident that the regulation was effective. The rate of gun homicide went down by forty-two percent in seven years after the law was enacted (Harvard Injury Control Research Centre, 2011). When few people possess guns, the motivation to use them in restricted areas such as schools also goes down.
The Brady law which was enacted in 1994 up until 2012 prevented more than 2.4 million proscribed buyers such as convicted offenders, domestic abusers, those with mental disorders and other possibly dangerous people from buying guns or being given permits to carry firearms. In 2012 only, the background checks prevented 192,043 proscribed buyers from acquiring guns. Surprisingly enough, it was also in the same year that Adam Lanza went to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot twenty-eight students dead after gunning down his mother. This triggered questions about the effectiveness of gun control laws. Adam was psychologically insane, and since he was not charged, allowed him to acquire the guns that he utilized in the murdering spree. The Brady campaign released evidence indicating that background checks actually reduce school shootings. Had Adam been institutionalized as a mentally ill individual, he would not have bought the gun that he used to kill the children.
Usually, counter-arguments to the evidence on the effectiveness of gun control are brought up as people wonder why Chicago, despite having some of the most stringent firearm policies in America still has so much gun violence. This argument does not necessarily make gun control efforts a failure. The problem is that where regulations are strict, people simply cross over to states that have lax jurisdictions. This can be applied to those who purchase guns to perpetuate school shootings. A state like Indiana has slacker regulations allowing more people from Chicago to buy guns illegally adding to the number of people who own firearms in Chicago.
Research has it that more guns reflect more deaths and this is true even for schools (Chalabi, 2012). The practices of locking up firearms, storing them unloaded and keeping ammunition in a separate location help in preventing children from using their parents’ guns to shoot others or themselves. Research aimed at evaluating the relationship between school shootings and youth-focused firearm laws found that laws that prevented access lowered the risk of children going to school with guns by 8.3%. It is discouraging to learn that students go to class with concealed firearms on some campuses. Jurisdiction can easily control this; however, some states already allow guns on post-high school campuses making gun possession less of a big deal. Studies have been done to ascertain how this affects safety in schools but looking at it carefully it is fair to conclude that this is likely to increase the incidences of school shootings.
Arguments against gun control laws have it that such laws cannot deter school shootings because the victims are infringed on their right to defend themselves and enhance their sense of safety. The National Rifle Association stated that every year people use guns for self-defense 2.5 million times. According to NRA, the police are not capable of full-time protection. The contenders argue that despite being armed, the guard at the Florida high school was not able to stop the gunman from shooting all those students (Bhunjun, 2018). The police took time to arrive at the school and in that process, more people met their death. A professor at George Mason University stated that human beings have a fundamental natural right to self-defense that should not be taken from them by policymakers. The NRA vice president said that a criminal or bad person who is in possession of a gun can only be stopped by a sober and good person who also has a gun. A study conducted on convicted felons showed that most of them refrained from engaging in criminal acts when they were aware of the victim’s possession of a firearm. This could be the basis from which Donald Trump derived his idea of training and arming all teachers in the United States.
To deal with the numerous shootings that take place in schools, the US must put in more effort than anyone cares to admit. When people argue either for or against gun control as a way to end school shootings, they focus on some specific measures instead of broadening their scope. What is often considered for instance includes, banning those with mental illness from acquiring guns, doing universal background checks, and restricting the purchase of assault weapons. Not even the intelligence team or esteemed politicians dare to go beyond those. The Australian law, for example, is never given much consideration. The US must realize that the gun problem is extraordinarily dire and it calls for solutions that go deeper than what is expressed in the mainstream proposals.
If the issue lies in the abundance of guns in America, then policies must be developed to reduce the circulation of firearms and consequently reduce the number of innocent lives lost due to school shootings. It is impossible to achieve a significant drop in school shooting incidences by doing background checks on a short term. America likely requires a gun confiscation program coupled with an austere ban on particular firearms. Sadly, though, no member of Congress has made a seriously sweeping proposition regarding gun control and school shootings. The Manchin-Toomey bill was the only other regulation on guns after Sandy Hook that reached Congress and was almost being passed into law. Despite that, it did not even institute worldwide background checks. There have been even milder proposals, which entail taking tiny steps like enhancing the background check system and proscribing bump stocks.
The Second Amendment also plays a role in the holdup. While reasonable discourses on the effectiveness of the Second Amendment in protecting the individual rights of the Americans exist, the reality is that policymakers, as well as the US Supreme Court widely, agree that the Second Amendment restricts gun control (Bhunjun, 2018). Thus, the United States, for legal, cultural and political reasons appears incapable of acting upon the rampant cases of school shootings by taking the necessary action which is establishing gun control laws. If the US needs to achieve the low level of school shootings that its European counterparts report, much has to be done regarding the NRA and gun control regulation.
References
Bhunjun, A., (2018). What is the Second Amendment and how does it influence gun control laws? Metro News. Retrieved From: http://metro.co.uk/2018/02/20/what-is-the-second-amendment-and-how-does-it-influence-gun-control-laws-7326880/Chalabi, M., (2012). Gun homicides and gun ownership listed by country: Where are the world’s guns – and which countries have the highest rates of firearms murders? The Guardian. Retrieved From: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-listGuns in the US: The statistics behind the violence. (2016). BBC News. Retrieved From: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34996604Harvard Injury Control Research Centre (2011). The Australian Gun Buyback. Bulletins. Retrieved From: https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1264/2012/10/bulletins_australia_spring_2011.pdf