In light of the recent school shooting in Parkland and the March for Our Lives event that happened the other day, I decided to educate myself on gun violence and gun control. I decided it wasn't enough to take what my parents or what the media says on the subject. I needed to gather information myself.
Based on what I've read and learned, I can strongly say I believe in what March for Out Lives is fighting for. Something needs to be done to prevent more mass shootings from taking place.
Here's a list of the articles I read that helped me come to this decision. I believe education is very important when making any decision.
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2018/02/20/australia-gun-control-success
"On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man named Martin Bryant drove his yellow Volvo to a popular tourist spot in Port Arthur, Australia, a former penal colony on the island state of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon. Before the day was through, he had shot dead 35 people and wounded 18 others.
Within just weeks of that tragedy, elected officials in each of Australia's six states and two mainland territories—pressed forward by police chiefs across the continent and by the then-newly elected prime minister—banned semi-automatic and other military-style weapons across the country. The federal government of Australia prohibited their import, and lawmakers introduced a generous nationwide gun buyback program, funded with a Medicare tax, to encourage Australians to freely give up their assault-style weapons. Amazingly, many of them did (Leaf, 2018)."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/85994716
"After a mass shooting at a school in 1996, the British government pursued legislative bans on assault rifles and handguns and tightened background checks for other types of firearms. As of 2013, a total of 200,000 guns and 700 tons of ammunition were taken off British streets. Military-style weapons and most handguns were banned, the Washington Post reported (Onyanga-Omara, 2018)"
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
"In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been more than 1,600 mass shootings, with more than 1,800 people killed and more than 6,400 wounded as of February 2018 (Lopez, 2018)."
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html
"On Wednesday, Nikolas Cruz, 19, arrived at the halls of his former school in Parkland, Florida. Armed with a rifle, he allegedly carried out a massacre that left 17 people dead.
In October 2017, 64-year-old gunman Stephen Paddock fired into crowds gathered at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 500 people were injured. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.
In 2016, an attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando left 49 people dead. In 2012, Adam Lanza went on a shooting spree in Newtown, Connecticut, killing his mother before murdering 26 students and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School; in 2007, 32 people were killed in the Virginia Tech massacre (Fox, 2018)."
https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-guns-self-defense-charleston-20150619-story.html%3foutputType=amp
"So what conclusions can we draw from this? The notion that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun is a romanticized vision of the nature of violent crime (Martelle, 2015)."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/14/for-every-gun-used-in-self-defense-six-more-are-used-to-commit-a-crime/
