By Tabitha Redder/reporter
When will it stop?
Last week, a 19-year-old Texas Tech student shot and killed a police officer in Lubbock.
The week before, 59 victims were killed in a mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music concert.
The same week, Time magazine reported on a 4-year-old that accidentally shot and killed his grandfather in North Carolina. In an unrelated incident, another toddler shot two other children at a day care facility in Detroit.
This is but a partial list of firearm-related deaths in the U.S. in one month and does not take into consideration fatalities caused by law enforcement’s abuse of power. This is a mere miniscule snapshot of the gun problem we have in America.
The Guardian crunched the numbers to find that there is one mass shooting every nine out of ten days in our country.
It also reported there are more guns in America than there are people.
The First Amendment defends a gun owner’s right to possession, but were the Founding Fathers really shielding the rights of 3 percent of American adults, deemed “super-owners,” by The Guardian because they have 17 guns each?
Unfortunately, gun owners have proven again and again they cannot isolate the variables and maintain the gun safety they learned in gun class, or through whatever credentials one needs to obtain a firearm.
My mistake, there are actually no credentials needed to buy a gun. This can be seen in the viral 2014 video where a 13-year-old is denied access to alcohol and lottery tickets but buys a firearm at a gun show with ease.
Gun owners and advocates need to stop and think of others. A gun may protect some in whatever distorted reality they dwell in, but others will be impacted, like in the case of the dead 4-year-old.
In a recent Politico survey, almost half of GOP voters support stricter gun control in the U.S. This is an increase from 37 percent in June 2016, which is promising.
The Mass Shooting Tracker, which tracks data of mass shootings in the U.S., has already tracked 350 mass shootings this year with 483 deaths and 1,748 wounded.
The clock is ticking.
