Speech On Gun Violence At Stoneman Douglas High School

On Feb.14, 2018, a nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire on students attending Stoneman Douglas High School. He killed 17 students raising questions about how a nineteen-year-old was able to attain a semi-automatic rifle. This is a tragedy, such a sad waste of human life. In the back of your head, you might think that such a tragedy will never happen in our maple syrup loving country known as Canada, right? Well, that’s what I’ll be discussing today. Good morning honourable judges, teachers and my fellow students, today I’ll be talking about gun violence in Canada.

Now, students, I would like for you to take a quick glance at your fellow peers for a moment. Most have you have been together as early as kindergarten, correct? You have
probably been friends with each other for quite some time. Now, what if I were to tell you that a child no older than fourteen, can be a school shooter. On April 28, 1999, a then 14-year-old Todd Cameron Smith walked into W.R. Myers High School with a .22 caliber rifle and began firing at three students in a hallway, killing one student and wounding another. There are shooters of all ages. There might be one sitting next to you.

Now, remember when I said that we’re Canadian and we supposedly don’t have to worry about shootings in our "gun free" country?
Well, I am going to tell you a different story straight from the red, white and leaf. Dec.6,1989, a twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine armed with a rifle and hunting knife killed 14 innocent female students and himself in what is known as the École Polytechnique massacre/Montreal massacre. He described his motive in a suicide note he wrote which was that feminists ruined his life. This is considered one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian
history.

So far I have discussed one of the worst mass shootings in Canada which is the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, and the W.
R. Myers High School shooting in Alberta. If you have been paying attention, you may have noticed a few similarities with the stories I've told thus far, such as all of them took place in a school environment, or all the shooters were armed with an automatic weapon like Marc Lépine's semi-automatic rifle. This begs the question, how are fourteen-year-olds able to have possession of a semi-automatic rifle in Canada? Well, it's quite simple, semi-automatic weapons aren't banned in Canada. So all a fourteen-year-old needs to commit a similar act are a motive, a guardian with a gun license, and a semi-automatic weapon. Canada doesn't look like such an innocent country now, does it?

When it comes to a political argument such as this one, you have to have two sides. So far I've been discussing the flaws in our gun laws, but It's about time that I discuss some positives about Canada's gun laws. For starters, if you want to possess a firearm in Canada, you need a gun license or permit. In some states in the United States such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Washington, you don't need a gun license or permit to possess a firearm. The legal age to possess a firearm in Canada is eighteen, but if you wanted to legally possess a gun in Kenya, you only need to be
twelve-years-old!

Overall, I would like to think that our gun violence is significantly low with a few exceptions here and there. I still feel that law about semi-automatic weapons should be tweaked so that at the bare minimum an assault rifle is banned. Now before I leave, I want to share an interesting statistic I found while researching this topic. You’re more likely to be shot to death in the United States than you are to die in a car accident in Canada.