March For Our Lives sparks nationwide movement to end gun violence
By Alexis Ancel // Editor-in-Chief
For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to explain what it felt like. I’ve tried to explain what it was like to see how many hands went up in a crowd of 800,000 people when a 17-year-old speaker asked who had been personally affected by gun violence. I’ve tried to explain what it felt like the moment that crowd of 800,000 people fell so silent that I could hear the woman next to me breathing. Every time I’ve tried to verbalize the experience of being in Washington, D.C. for the March For Our Lives on March 24, I come up dry, because nothing I have experienced in my 21 years on this planet is remotely comparable. I’ve been to marches before. I’ve been to protests before. This was different. It felt different from the minute I stepped onto Pennsylvania Avenue. This time, I felt like maybe something could actually change.
Much of the discussion surrounding gun control has been sparked by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, following the mass shooting that took 17 lives on Feb. 14. These students have been spearheading a movement that has taken root and spread worldwide, but the issue of gun violence is not specific to schools. As this country has come to see far too often, mass shootings can happen anywhere. If our country has reached a point where we cannot feel safe in schools, movie theaters, nightclubs, churches or concerts, something needs to change.
Gun violence has come to feel all too normal in this country, but perhaps what scares me the most is the fact that the debate itself has become just as repetitive. Everything I am saying is hardly an echo of what millions around the nation have been screaming for almost two decades. We are the only developed nation that sees this kind of gun related violence in such staggering numbers, yet we still have seen very little, if any, improvement on an issue that so many have been fighting for decades.
And the numbers speak for themselves. According to Everytown, an organization that works to prevent gun violence, an average of 96 Americans are killed with guns every single day, seven of which are children or teens. In total, that’s an average of over 35,000 people who are killed with guns in this country every year, and for each one of those people, two more are injured.
But perhaps the most startling numbers are those of other developed nations when compared to our own. The U.S. saw 346 mass shootings in 2017 alone, while Australia hasn’t had a single one since 1996. Of the developed nations, Canada has the second highest average of 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 people. The U.S. averages 3.61 gun homicides per 100,000 people, which totals approximately 13,000 gun homicides annually. Guns are also responsible for 90 percent of suicide attempts that result in death. To put it in perspective, the average person is 25 times more likely to be killed with a gun in the U.S. than in any other developed country.
With these kinds of statistics, it seems like it would be hard to deny that we have a problem with gun violence in this country, yet somehow a 200-year-old amendment is still being used to defend and deny this problem. I always find myself returning to something President Obama said in a speech on gun control initiatives: “How did we get to the place where people think requiring a comprehensive background check means taking away people’s guns?”
The right to bear arms does not mean that anyone, including those who are mentally unstable or have a criminal record, should be able to legally obtain weapons of mass destruction. Say it with me: gun control does not mean taking guns away from responsible owners. It means making sure that guns are only in the hands of responsible owners—those who use them to prevent violence rather than inflict it. The goal of this movement is not to take firearms away from these people. It is, quite simply, to make sure that guns are legally accessible only to people who are able to use them safely and responsibly.
The damage a firearm can do is irreparable, but it is preventable—not by arming more people, but by raising awareness and lobbying for safer gun laws. It’s preventable by voting out politicians who prioritize the NRA’s money over the safety of the citizens they were elected to protect. It’s preventable by implementing safer gun laws that prevent a mentally unstable individual from going to a gun show at the age of 18 and legally obtaining a semi-automatic weapon and the accessories to make it fully automatic.
Though mass shootings may garner the most media attention, this problem goes beyond Columbine, Newtown, Pulse, Las Vegas and Parkland. This movement is also about the 52 percent of women who are killed by a family member or intimate partner with a gun, totaling about 50 women per month. It’s about the black men who are 13 times more likely to be shot to death than white men. A gun issue is a race issue is a class issue is a gender issue, because gun violence doesn’t stop at the stories you hear on the news. It doesn’t stop at gang violence, and it doesn’t stop at accidental deaths, and it doesn’t stop and it doesn’t stop and it doesn’t stop.
Saying that gun control won’t prevent every gun related death is not a valid excuse for the state that our country is in. Banning assault weapons and imposing stricter background checks won’t save everyone, but they will save lives—some of the children killed on the street, some of the people who die by suicide using guns, and some of the women who are victims of intimate partner violence. Every death prevented by gun control is one more family that doesn’t have to bury someone they love.
Listen to the stories of kids who have lost friends, parents who have lost kids, and students, church members and moviegoers who will live with the experience of a mass shooting for the rest of their lives. Listen to the stories of the kids who grow accustomed to the sound of gunshots before they learn how to read. Listen to the stories of anyone who has been affected by gun violence, and then try to explain to me why your right to an AR-15 outweighs a child’s right to not be shot by one.
I learned a lot from this march that I didn’t expect to learn, but the one feeling that I can’t quite shake is the compulsive need to do more. This is a problem that affects us all. High school students and young people around the country are proving every step of the way that the rest of us have no excuse for inaction, especially now. Not when so many lives depend on it.
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