A Solution to The Mass Shooting Problem in America (WP3)

Some people go through the most unthinkable experiences all at the hands of a gun. Some people are very lucky to never go through that, but that doesn’t mean that we should forget and ignore the problems that guns create just because we haven’t endured them. Over this last winter break, I went through my own experience of an attempted shooting at my local mall while Christmas shopping. It was a moment that I will never forget because you always think of the situation being something you hear of but never experienced and you can’t truly fathom those events until you are in it yourself. I remember holding on to my mom so tight and not wanting to let go of her, reverting back to my five-year-old helpless self, seeking comfort and reassurance from my mother. We were very fortunate to come out of that situation unharmed and safe, but that is not always the case.

While we can’t directly put the blame on the person and there is always a case-by-case basis as to why a person has decided they wanted to go through with their choices, there is always a common denominator in each case. That denominator is the weapon of choice, firearms.

Gun violence is a problem because it causes a lot of problems in society. According to Educational Fund To Stop Gun Violence, “In 2020, 45,222 people, an average of 124 every day, lost their lives to gun violence,” (Educational Fund To Stop Gun Violence, 2022, para.1), which is a 15% increase from the stats of 2019. America has seen over 1,783 mass shooting incidents from the years 2018 to 2021 alone, this is not even a complete calculation of all the events that have taken place before 2018. This should definitely be something that makes people raise a brow and question what can be done to eliminate this from going on.

We must form a better way to control the usage of firearms and who is going out and buying these firearms. Whenever there is a mass shooting or gun violence event, people always go straight to claiming that the person had a mental illness, now if that is the case we need to do extensive research and testing for people before they go and purchase a gun so that we never have to reach that point of someone committing a mass shooting.

Getting rid of firearms all at once isn’t very realistic, so instead of trying to find a way to confiscate all the guns in America, the solution to be proposed is to create a better and stricter process for owning a gun. The following steps would implement this proposal; mental health check, taking a class and passing a test, and issuing a new ID. Everyone who wants to purchase a gun has to take a mandatory mental health check, this is to ensure that the person who is interested in buying the gun is doing ok mentally, this would involve making sure that they didn’t go through a traumatic experience (like getting fired from their job, their significant other breaking up with them, etc.) that would result in them wanting to buy a gun. If they pass the mental health check then they can move on to the next step which would be for them to take a class, it would highlight gun safety and what it means to be a gun owner (the responsibility, etc.). After the class, they would have to take a test that would go over what they just learned and if they pass that then they can go ahead and move forward with purchasing a firearm. Either every six months or every year the person would have to go through this process again to make sure that they are still eligible of owning a firearm.

The next final step would be the longest step to go through and that would be to issue a new ID/driver's license. Much like how some people have a little symbol when they are organ donors, people who are gun owners would have their own little symbol. It would just prove that they went through the proper steps of obtaining a gun and that they are legal gun carriers. Also, it would get rid of a huge step for when people get pulled over and get asked if they have any weapons in the car. If you show a police officer your license and they see the symbol then they can move forward with asking if you have your firearm in the car with you.

These are important steps or actions to take because ensure that the right people are getting access to guns, people who are mentally stable and are not going through something. It makes the person aware of the responsibility they hold when they purchase a gun and just all-around more aware of the object that they are owning. When researching gun violence, a common phrase of how this was a health risk to society often came up, which was a new way to think about the topic. The 2016 article, A modest proposal on gun control - and a real one, says “Since much of the US has strict laws regulating (some would say restricting) abortions, presumably to protect the health of Americans, maybe we can learn something from them and apply the same principles to another perceived health risk—firearms” (Kamerow, 2016, p. 1). It talks about starting a new process of owning guns and treating it like a health problem since it causes a big percentage of fatalities in America. The article on the Amnesty International website furthers this idea of gun violence being a health risk by saying “Firearm violence can undermine people’s right to health. People living in communities with high levels of firearm violence can find it difficult or dangerous to access local health care facilities” (Amnesty, 2021, para. 24). They explain that a lot of the time health services avoid going to these areas because of the fact that it such a high level of firearm violence occurring there and that they don’t have the proper staff to go with them. So as a result, people are not getting the medical attention they deserve just because there is such a high number of violence with guns in their neighborhoods.

For questions being raised about how effective this will actually be, we can take a lot at other countries around the world that have strict gun laws and how many gun violence accidents they have had since their law changes. In the article, Gun Control Around the World: A Primer, it breaks down different countries and their gun control laws. When looking at other countries, there is a common theme of a huge mass shooting incident happening, and their governments taking immediate action in response to that. In 1996 in Australia there was a mass shooting where a man killed 35 people and wounded 23, “Less than two weeks later, the conservative-led national government pushed through fundamental changes to the country’s gun laws in cooperation with various states, which regulate firearms” (Masters, 2016, para. 15). Since then they had one other mass shooting occur in 2002, which made them tighten their gun laws even more, and ever since then their mass shooting they have not seen a terrible mass shooting like the ones that occurred in 1996 and 2002. So if this one large incident caused immediate response and rise to action in Australia, why can't the same happen in America after years of mass shooting after mass shooting. This shows that making stricter gun laws can be effective, even in a short amount of time of making them and it doesn’t completely rip away the right of owning guns, it just makes it more controlled of who has access to them. Australia wasn’t the only country they provided information on, they continued to list examples from the United Kingdom, Norway, Canada, Israel, and Japan. Japan’s process is similar to the one that I am proposing, in which they must “...obtain formal instruction and pass a battery of written, mental, and drug tests and a rigorous background check” (Masters, 2016, para. 27). In Japan, they must also tell the authorities how their weapons and ammunition are being stored and go through an annual firearm inspection, which some may say is too much to go through, but looking at their rates and seeing as they are the lowest in the world when it comes to gun homicide rates, I think that it says a lot and is something to look at.

You may be wondering “what about the possibility of people creating fake IDs”? To which I provide you with a solution of it having a symbol that can only be detected through light to prove that it is real, much like the security thread that we see in money or like the holograms used in IDs that show the state seal. They could add a holographic gun feature that when tilted at just the right angle you could detect if the person was a gun owner or not. In order to get this feature, it would be required for the facility to send over information regarding that a person has just purchased a firearm legally and for them to get a new ID issued. This would then prove that they bought a firearm and went through the proper steps, so if their name were to be checked in a system it would reflect the same findings when you look at their IDs.

When talking about the funding of this and not wasting taxpayer dollars going into this, newsflash taxpayers’ dollars are already going into paying for the aftermath effects of gun violence, so why can’t we put that money that is already being used to try and find ways to a solution. According to the Everytown Research and Policy article “Roughly $12.7 billion in tax money per year pays for our country’s gun violence epidemic” (Everytown Research & Policy, 2022, para. 14). We can shift that money as I said, tax money is already going towards something that is not benefiting us at all so why not put that money towards an idea that could save lives and families from heartbreak. “Individuals, families, and employers pay $1.7 billion annually in out-of-pocket medical and mental health care costs for gun-related violence in America.” (Everytown Research & Policy, 2022, para. 14). I think that shifting the money to facilities and this proposal would ultimately be way less money because when you think about how many people they are in the country and how many of those people’s medical and mental health bills are being paid for in response to gun-related violence, that is a lot compared to the few facilities that would be sprinkled throughout the country. I think that Everytown Research & Policy put it best when they said “...we are spending precious funding on an epidemic that brings nothing of benefit and plenty of heartbreak and broken lives” (Everytown Research & Policy, 2022, para. 14).

Finally the question of how will these tests work and who will run them. The article from The Brink brings in a good topic about the importance of who has ownership of the gun instead of the type of gun a person has. They said, “States need to have two types of laws to be effective: first, restrictions on who can access a gun; and second, universal background checks so that you know whether a prospective buyer is subject to those restrictions” (Colarossi & McAlpine, 2019, para. 14). The problem isn’t the gun itself, the problem is ultimately the person, a bullet doesn’t have a target. Having these tests would allow for a background check essentially on the person, it is to ensure that they are handing over a firearm into the right hands. It makes the process a bit harder and makes it to where you can’t just walk in a buy a gun. We see it constantly on the news where someone easily bought a gun without any questions asked and then committed a mass murder the following day. This could be avoided with the process of taking a mental health test, getting asked those questions of “have there been any life changes recently”, etc. Red flags would pop up and not allow the person to move on to the next step if it seems that they are not qualified mentally to own a gun. As to the question of who would be running the test, that can easily be answered by certified psychiatrists/psychologists who would be the ones running these tests and overseeing them. I think that it is important to have experts doing this because they would see something questionable pop up in a response to a question, it would be right to have just anybody oversee these tests.

In conclusion, I realize that there will never be a complete end to gun violence, but there is always a step forward in solutions. I think that my proposal could be very effective in combating the problem that we see on an almost daily basis in America and could be a step forward in life. While this is still a work in progress, I think that the potential that this has is evident and could be really impactful, if other countries could do a similar process so could we, they have paved the way for us to see that it not hard to do once there is a push. Everyone in America needs to be involved though and contribute to the solution, this can’t just be a one-man job, this is something that affects all of us so it should be something that we all see to improve. The experience that I went through, albeit I came out of it unharmed, was very life-changing and traumatizing in a sense and I don’t see why we are continuing to allow this to happen to people. It was not something that I wanted to see people go through prior to my experience and it is definitely something that I feel strongly about still after my experience. I hope to see a day where we can turn on the news or go on our social media accounts and not see the breaking news of a mass shooting and that can’t happen without you.

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References

Colarossi, J., & McApline, K. J. (2019, August 6). State gun laws that actually reduce gun deaths. Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/state-gun-laws-that-reduce-gun-deaths/

The economic cost of gun violence. Everytown Research & Policy. (2022, March 2). https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-economic-cost-of-gun-violence/

Gun violence. Amnesty International. (2021, April 19). https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/arms-control/gun-violence/

Kamerow, D. (2016). A modest proposal on gun control—and a real one. BMJ, i69. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i69

Masters, J. (2016, January 13). Gun control around the world: A Primer. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/worldwide-gun-control-policy/423711/

United States. The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. (2022, January 7). https://efsgv.org/state/united-states/

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