Hannah Soyer
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In the three years since the Sandy Hook shooting in which 20 children and six adult staffers were killed, 555 American children under the age of 12 have died of gunshots, according to a study done by NBC.According to the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, guns claimed the lives of 33,599 Americans last year.
On Dec. 12, two days before the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, a group of Iowa City locals gathered to march for the end of gun violence. Members of the group Moms Demand Action were also in attendance, along with Sen. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City, who was one of the people to speak to the crowd.
Considering the failure of the federal government to act on the issue of gun violence, states are now taking the initiative to act. However, the response to Sandy Hook, among the 893 other mass shootings that have occurred in the United States since then, has been varied. For example, eight states don’t require a license in order to carry concealed weapons, and 12 states have made it a requirement for universities to allow license-holders to carry concealed on campus.
Thankfully, Iowa is not one of these states, where it is still a Class D felony to bring a firearm on to school grounds, and where Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, despite his many failings, has declared that he is determined to keep it that way. However, the number of deaths due to firearms in Iowa in 2013 per 100,000 people was 8, which was on the middle of the scale of the rest of the states. Clearly, our nation still has a problem.
If the responsibility to strengthen gun laws is now being passed onto the states, who knows how much safer certain states will become, which are most likely to make current gun laws more lenient? And even if gun laws in states don’t change, as they’re not likely to do in Iowa, people are still being killed. Because Congress failed to pass several bills that would strengthen federal gun laws, it is now expected that President Obama will take executive action to do so.
One very crucial way he could do this is by making it illegal for people to buy guns online or at gun shows without background checks. Still, this may not be enough to stop the deaths by guns. Most likely, it is going to take combined actions from the federal and state governments to stop this. Hopefully, this happens soon, as the number of deaths keeps climbing.
Mass shootings are the incidents covered by media, and the sheer number of them in the past year is horrific. Unfortunately, the horror doesn’t just stop there, as mass shootings make up only a small percentage of actual deaths in America by guns, meaning that the problem is even larger than the general public may perceive. It’s easy to feel as if there’s nothing that you can do as an individual to change this, but as corny as it sounds, it’s important to make your voice heard. The Iowa City locals who marched on Dec. 12 should be commended, along with those who take the time to get in contact with their local governments and state policymakers.