Mass Shootings are Becoming a Big Problem (WP1)

Over this last winter break, I had an experience that I never thought I would ever go through. My local mall had witnessed an attempted mass shooting during the holiday season. It was a few days before Christmas and I was there with my mom doing some last minute gift shopping. What once started out as a calm and productive trip, soon turned into a moment of fear and panic.

My mom and I were towards the back of our mall when all of a sudden we heard people screaming and running towards the store we were in. This of course made us on high alert because we had no idea what was going on since we were nowhere near the initial point of action. We soon found out what was going on since someone had screamed that there was a person in another store going around with a gun. We tried to leave the store as quickly as we could when we found this out, but when we got towards the exit they had locked the doors due to “protocol.” At that moment I felt trapped, I thought that there was no way I would leave that mall unharmed when I had nowhere to go.

We had no idea where the man was in the mall at this moment and the only thing that was on our minds was to get to somewhere safe in this shop. I held onto my mom and didn’t want to let her go, I instantly turned back into my five-year-old helpless self, going to my mother for comfort and reassurance I was safe. We found a space to sit and just prayed that it would keep us safe until we were able to get up and leave the area. I do not know how long we sat there exactly but it felt like I was sitting there for forever and would never get to leave. When we were finally able to leave, I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. We had survived the unthinkable and managed to come out of it unharmed. I never would have thought that I would go through something like this, this was the first time it has ever occurred in my town, so I assumed the worst of it but came out of the situation grateful beyond measures.

We live in a country where guns can be easily accessible to anyone really. At some point that creates a problem over time because you can be walking around anywhere and you don’t know if this is the moment where a shooting will happen. This innocent shopping trip for some Christmas gifts, should have never turned into a moment of terror and panic. Mass shootings have been a long reoccurring problem in this country, especially in the last few years. According to CBS News, “By the end of 2019, there were 417 mass shootings in the U.S. …”. When you really put that into perspective, that means that there were more shootings that happened than there were days in the year. Which is completely insane to think about because that would mean that logistically speaking, a shooting would have to occur every day of the year and then some.

The year 2019 is credited to being the U.S. 's record breaking year for having the most mass killings occur in a single year, according to USA Today and multiple other news publications. Now when we entered the pandemic we noticed the rates of mass shootings go down and I think that had a lot to do with people staying home and not being out. There were limited resources available at that time since the whole world kind of shut down and there weren’t mass crowds of people anywhere. Although there weren't many mass shootings to occur during 2020, there was still a lot of gun violence that went on at a much smaller scale, which is still a problem. The New York Times wrote an article about how 2020 was a year where there weren’t mass killings because “the pandemic forced most businesses, workplaces and schools to close…”. They also said that “other types of gun violence increased significantly in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive” and that most of those were from gang violence and domestic incidents. So this issue can be extended to not only mass shooting but gun violence all together as a whole, which we can see is a common problem in our country on many occasions throughout the last few decades.

As we are slowly getting back into the motions of “normalcy,” these events are taking place again and it’s sad to think that something like this is considered to be normal. My best friend who goes to UCLA similarly had to deal with something like this a couple days ago. There was an ex-professor who had threatened his old department and students of coming back to campus and committing a mass shooting. Her school and dorm were on lockdown and they really didn’t know what was going on and that made them feel uneasy. They only knew that they weren’t allowed to leave their dorms until further notice and that they should not go to class for the next few days. She felt anxious not knowing when she would be able to leave. Also being from the same town as me, she has never experienced something like this first hand, so it being on her campus and them not really knowing anything about the situation made her feel hopeless and she didn’t know how to handle the situation.

Children should not have to go to school with the thought in the back of their minds of if today is the day that they might not be able to go home and sleep in their beds. You should not have to worry about going to a place of sanctuary, having your day of faith interrupted by someone who does not like your beliefs. This is an issue that has gone on for way too long and will continue to go on if we just sit here doing nothing. How many more lives need to be lost in order for people to realize that our laws against guns are not strong enough and they need to be reprimanded.

This is something that we need to come together and stop. Some people excuse mental health as a solution to gun violence when it is the power that person has over these groups of people, when that’s not really the case here. There needs to be accountability held and we need stricter gun laws because this is going to be a problem that will only get worse and never get better. There are many countries that haven’t seen a mass shooting in years because they have a very lengthy process for someone to obtain a gun. If other countries and citizens can see a problem and come together to fix something that is truly horrible, why can we not see that same change. This isn’t just something that needs to be a state to state decision, this needs to be a nationwide decision. This wouldn’t just fix mass shootings problems, it would fix all incidents involving gun violence.

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References

Associated Press (2019, December 28). US mass killings hit a record high in 2019: 'This seems to be the age of mass shootings'. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/28/us-mass-shootings-killings-2019-41-record-high/2748794001/

Cramer, M. (2021, March 19). Mass shootings in public spaces had become less frequent during the pandemic. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/us/mass-shootings.html

Silverstein, J. (2020, January 2). There were more mass shootings than days in 2019. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mass-shootings-2019-more-than-days-365/

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Photo Taken By: Chip Vincent from Unsplash