Breaking News: Another shooting has taken place, leaving two dead and one injured in an Oregon high school.
Does this news even stop you in your tracks anymore? I can remember a time when school shootings brought the entire country to a halt, where we sat glued to our television sets questioning how someone was capable of attacking young kids in an ostensibly safe environment. But is it that way anymore or have these tragedies become so commonplace that they’ve become the norm?
The incident that occurred Tuesday in Oregon marked the 74th school shooting since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. To put that in perspective, that means, on average, there has been a school shooting every 7.35 days in the last 18 months, according to Yahoo!
Via: washingtonpost.com
Pundits and the general public within our country blame multiple factors for these growing numbers, such as mental illness, lack of gun control and bullying.
It’s no secret that pretty much anyone can get their hands on a gun in the U.S. We have more guns and gun deaths than any other county, according to a 2013 study by two New York City cardiologists. In this study, they found that the U.S. has 88 guns per 100 people. Now, let’s compare that to Japan, which was found to have .6 guns per 100 people.
My point is we have a gun control problem. Regardless of our right to bear arms, we’ve come to a point where we must ask ourselves if our right for almost any individual to handle a gun is worth the more than 30,000 people who die from gun-related deaths every year.
“We’re the only developed country on Earth where this happens,” President Obama said in an online event sponsored by Tumblr. “And it happens now once a week.”
Though Obama has put forth efforts to put restrictions on guns, he says that it will take change in the public opinion to get Congress to approve changes.
“It’s not even possible to get even the mildest restrictions through Congress, and we should be ashamed of that,” he said.
Via: upi.com
Gun control is a major issue for our country, but that isn’t the only factor that’s causing these shootings. At least six out of 10 American youths witness bullying at least once a day, according to the American Society for the Positive Care of Children.
Think about your life, can you recall at least one instance of someone picking on you, making fun of you, pushing you around to the point where you felt insecure, vulnerable or physically hurt? I don’t think it’s shocking that so many people take frustrations out on institutions where a lot of this bullying takes place.
How do we move forward though? I think we need to begin to give a shit about the world around us. Just because it isn’t your school that the shooting occurred at doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been. We need to care about the rest of this country the way we used to, because school shootings shouldn’t become a norm.
Bullying is always going to exist, but we can help to make it less and less of a norm, and hopefully it can become something that isn’t tolerated. We need to show children that they always have someone they can go to, and that they should never resort to violence.
Via: happysmartme.org
Our society has always been fascinated with school shootings. Why do they happen? Why does our country have a significantly greater amount than any other?
“Nineteen Minutes,” a book by Jodi Picoult, is a fictional story about a school shooting in a small town and its aftermath. The interesting part, though, is that at the end you almost feel bad for the shooter. It’s easy for us to call the criminal an insane monster, but I think we need to remember that every one of these shooters had a family. They’re all human and, whether or not they suffered from mental illnesses, they were all individually provoked into entering a school with a gun.
That’s what we should be thinking about. Not how to buff up the security at schools, but how to tackle this problem at its source. It’s not going to be fixed overnight, but maybe if we start to care a little more we can remember that we built society this way, and it can change. We can fix this.
Featured photo courtesy of: parentmap.com
