bharat pandey
Devastating gun violence in America
The day-to-day gun violence in America is worrying. So far many innocent people have been killed in this violence. Even though citizens in America have the freedom to keep guns, but what is the use of such freedom, which kills innocent people. But the US government needs to introspect and think about it.
A school shooting in Uvalde, a small town in the US state of Texas, has once again started a new debate about guns across the country. Neither this debate is new, nor is it that the children of America are killed by shooting a madman in schools. Similar is the case with Uvalde’s school, where a single gunman has killed 19 children. Even though this matter has become an international news, it is worth noting that so far this year there have been 27 incidents of shootings in schools.
According to Education Week, an organization that tracks incidents of shootings in schools, there have been 119 such incidents since 2018. These are the incidents in which someone has been injured or killed. These figures do not include incidents where shots were fired, but no one was injured.
According to an independent organization called the Gun Violence Archive, which collects data on such incidents in different places besides schools, there have been more than two hundred incidents of shooting in the US this year and the same incidents are recorded in this record, in which four or more than four People have been killed. From this it can be estimated that people in America have a gun and its misuse has taken a deadly form.
In such a situation, the question arises again and again that if this problem is so dangerous, then why do not the US governments do anything on it. Those opposing the ban on guns argue that it is a natural right of every American to have a gun and that making rules by governments will not solve this problem.
This argument is very wrong because after such incidents in many countries of the world, when the governments made rules and kept the process of keeping guns and getting licenses under surveillance, then these incidents decreased a lot. One such incident occurred in Scotland in 1996, in which fifteen children and a teacher died. After this incident, Britain tightened the rules regarding guns and since then there has been no other incident of this kind in Britain.
The British government banned the use of handguns by the general public after this incident. Similarly, after school shootings in Norway, Australia and New Zealand, gun laws were tightened and it became possible to stop shootings.
But despite hundreds of such incidents and the death of small children in America, the rules regarding guns are still very loose and these laws have not been changed in the last several years. Generally, any American citizen can easily buy any kind of weapon by going to a gun shop. These weapons include even assault rifles, which do not even require a license.
In such a situation, a part of the American population has many weapons. According to statistics, the number of weapons in the American people is more than 400 million compared to the American population of about 330 million, that is, every American has more than one weapon on average. Experts believe that the possession of weapons by teenage boys and people in general is a major reason for shootings in schools or malls.
In most cases of school violence, the attacker is found to be mentally disturbed, lonely or depressed. It is not right for such people to have weapons easily available at home. In a similar incident in the month of December, a teenager had opened fire on children of his own school. In this case, for the first time, the parents of the attacker were also tried, but despite this, no new rules were made regarding guns.
After the Texas incident, President Joe Biden has once again said that the rules need to be changed in this case, but he also knows that the Senate will not support him in this matter. Experts suggest that even if the purchase of guns is not banned, then knowing the background of the person who is buying the gun and banning the purchase of military grade weapons can also control violence.
But the US Senate does not support this matter either. This is not only due to the influence of the gun lobby, but also the issue of keeping guns is a very big political issue. To understand this going back a little, we reach the ‘Second Amendment’ of the US Constitution, which says that if the army is needed for the security of the free state, then there will be no restriction on the freedom of the common man to bear arms. Although it may have different definitions, it is generally associated with the freedom to own a gun. The Republican Party does not want to change this law and supports gun possession because of the vote of Americans especially in small towns and rural areas. America may be a progressive country, but it is extremely backward in terms of guns and violence. It is a country with rules, where people without any reason look at keeping a gun with their freedom. According to experts, America’s history has been violent.
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