Meihsin Chiang
UCWR 110
12/12/16
Beyond the Bullet
A CNN news headline on September 29, 2015 reads: “Another Chicago Family Gunned Down.” These sobering headlines seem to be appearing more frequently, and when gun violence hits close to home it can leave a more jarring impact. Whether it be examples of the toxic race relations in lower-income neighborhoods, increased incidences of school shootings, excessive use of police force, or terroristic threats – violence has pervaded the American culture. It has effectively created a pseudo-paranoid society. Violence has evolved over the past few decades, but guns are and continue to be the key resource for continuing the carnage. Unequivocally, guns have enabled the endless cycle of fear. Critics …show more content…
This belief is fundamentally true. But not every individual who is mentally unstable is a danger to our society, and more needs to be done to screen and help those that need professional treatment in order to prevent them from reaching such a destructive point in their lives. Nevertheless, this doesn’t change the fact that these mentally-unstable individuals are somehow still able to access firearms to commit monstrous acts of terrorism. This is a simple product of the lack of limitations on gun control which creates a sense of leniency, ultimately leading to no accountability or penalization on those who handle their firearms irresponsibly. In the United States, it is incredibly easy to violate the warrants on guns, and cities like Boston and Philadelphia are notorious for the practice of circumventing the law (Ernike). The problem is that there is no actual act of crime for people who are evading these loose rules. In other western countries that have enacted stricter gun laws, like in Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre in April of 1996, incidences of mass shootings have been drastically reduced. After the most recent shooting, President Obama bemoaned the fact that Americans have become more numb to these sort of acts of violence, as he lamented, "We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours – Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours, o we know there are ways to prevent it" (Sanchez). While arguing for the right to bear arms for self-defense purposes, there is also an inherent and universal right of American citizens to be protected from harm, and rather than picking one extreme over the other, a balance needs to
UCWR 110
12/12/16
Beyond the Bullet
A CNN news headline on September 29, 2015 reads: “Another Chicago Family Gunned Down.” These sobering headlines seem to be appearing more frequently, and when gun violence hits close to home it can leave a more jarring impact. Whether it be examples of the toxic race relations in lower-income neighborhoods, increased incidences of school shootings, excessive use of police force, or terroristic threats – violence has pervaded the American culture. It has effectively created a pseudo-paranoid society. Violence has evolved over the past few decades, but guns are and continue to be the key resource for continuing the carnage. Unequivocally, guns have enabled the endless cycle of fear. Critics …show more content…
This belief is fundamentally true. But not every individual who is mentally unstable is a danger to our society, and more needs to be done to screen and help those that need professional treatment in order to prevent them from reaching such a destructive point in their lives. Nevertheless, this doesn’t change the fact that these mentally-unstable individuals are somehow still able to access firearms to commit monstrous acts of terrorism. This is a simple product of the lack of limitations on gun control which creates a sense of leniency, ultimately leading to no accountability or penalization on those who handle their firearms irresponsibly. In the United States, it is incredibly easy to violate the warrants on guns, and cities like Boston and Philadelphia are notorious for the practice of circumventing the law (Ernike). The problem is that there is no actual act of crime for people who are evading these loose rules. In other western countries that have enacted stricter gun laws, like in Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre in April of 1996, incidences of mass shootings have been drastically reduced. After the most recent shooting, President Obama bemoaned the fact that Americans have become more numb to these sort of acts of violence, as he lamented, "We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours – Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours, o we know there are ways to prevent it" (Sanchez). While arguing for the right to bear arms for self-defense purposes, there is also an inherent and universal right of American citizens to be protected from harm, and rather than picking one extreme over the other, a balance needs to