“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” is what the Second Amendment reads.
The Amendment esentially states access to guns for citizens is vital to ensure the military does not become overpowered; citizens should be able to have guns should they revolt. When founding father James Madison proposed the Second Amendment, this is what he had in mind: making sure the military and government were not stronger than the people. But, what no one had in mind when the Second Amendment was being written was multiple mass shootings and thousands of people dying due to guns in the hands of those with pure hatred.
An average of 110 people per day die from guns, exponentially higher than any other country. Despite this, we still see that only 21/50 states require background checks to purchase a handgun, and many of these states that don’t have background checks to get handguns also don’t have background checks to get long guns, as well as very few limits on magazine numbers and limits.
Even with the reforms in some states, it still allows for access to many guns like Assault Rifles, specifically the AR-15 which is used for the majority of the mass shootings in the past 2 decades. All of this results in the fact that there have been 247 mass shootings in 2022 alone. Only halfway through the year.
But a common phrase you hear many GOP lawmakers say is, “It is not a gun problem, it is a mental health problem,” while doing nothing about mental health.
A perfect example of this is Texas governor Greg Abbott. On his Twitter he constantly tweets about providing mental health resources claiming that mental health resources will solve gun violence. But the same governor cut 200 million dollars from the Mental Health budget, a month before the devastating Uvalde shooting in the state where over 20 lives were lost due to a shooter.
Every country in the world has mental health issues. There are multiple countries with higher depression rates than the United States, but they do not have the same number of shootings that the United States has.
Other countries also do not have easy access to guns or have guns built into the roots of their country.
We live in a country where guns are built into our culture. There is no reversing the insane levels of guns out there and the guns that people already have access to, but what we can do is ensure that guns only get in the hands of those that need them.
This can be done by influencing and writing to lawmakers to introduce things like banning certain guns like assault rifles and influencing them to introduce policies with stricter and more intense background checks.Voting, most importantly, will have great impacts as well. . Connecticut is, fortunately, one of the states that have more restrictions when it comes to guns, and both senators and the governor both support adding more restrictions on guns to end gun violence.
It is no longer the 1700s, the world is completely different. The only guns available aren’t just shotguns and rifles; there are now guns that can shoot 45 rounds a minute, and with modifications can shoot up to 400 rounds a minute.
We also live in a world where a military “revolt,” would be all powerful despite the poppulation’s access to guns
Our founding fathers wrote the amendments based on the life of the 1700s and while many of them still make sense and are logical today, not all of them are. 18,733 deaths in half of a year due to guns alone is 18,733 deaths that could have been avoided had lawmakers across the country done their job and put in place policies that benefited the American people.