Gun Related Shootings

The early school morning of April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School seemed liked any other. That is, until Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on fellow students at 11:19 a.m. The following hour resulted in one of the first major mass shootings in the U.S., leaving twelve students and one teacher dead, as well as 21 injured. This horrifying shooting sparked the beginning of a long and grueling debate on gun control. Should civilians be able to buy automatic weapons? What about high-capacity ammunition clips? Are guns helpful at all? Such questions have arisen after every new account of a shooting, which seem to occur quite often based on their prevalent coverage on mainstream media outlets. Furthermore, with such strong stances on pro-
Gun violence has become a hot topic for politicians and news networks, and, due to its typical division along partisan lines in regards to gun control, statistics are often misrepresented or inflated in order to validate agendas, causing a great amount of confusion. This mostly occurs with basic statistics about gun related homicides. For example, CBS News claimed that there were 33,636 gun deaths in 2013. Hillary Clinton claimed the same during the third presidential debate of 2016. However, as reported by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), there were only 11,208 homicides by firearm that year (“Fact-Check: No, 33,000 Not Killed with Guns Each Year”, Breitbart.com). This immense difference happens because “gun deaths” is a general term that groups together murders, suicides, accidental shootings etc., but suicides alone make up about 62% of the 12,000 average annual gun homicides (“Gun Violence by the Numbers”, everytownresearch.org). Therefore, there is an average of 4,560 gun homicides every year in the U.S., suicides excluded. Not as bad as it sounded earlier, right? Next, many are unsure of the reason why gun violence
Again, the media mantra is that less guns would make for less crime. However, as previously shown, the first issue with this is that criminals will always be able to attain a firearm through illegal means despite gun laws that are in place. Secondly, a study done in England and Wales tracked gun homicides before and after a handgun ban was put into effect at the beginning of 1997. The immediate effect was a 50% increase in gun homicides in the country, a number that only began to recede after the police force was nearly doubled. Despite even these efforts, the homicide rate never lowered back to a pre-ban state. Such outcomes were not unique to the UK, though. In Ireland, a gun ban immediately elicited a more than 500% spike in homicide rates, which have only proceeded to increase since, and in Jamaica, gun homicide rates had steadily risen to 600% their original rate from before the gun ban over a span of 32 years. Similar, albeit less severe, results occurred after gun bans in Chicago and Washington D.C. as well. Quite obviously, not only do severe gun restrictions not reduce gun violence, they have a negative effect on gun homicide rates. Furthermore, per the PoliceOne survey, found that police are generally skeptical about the positive impact gun control can achieve on gun violence. For example, 95% of officers did