After nine students are dead in fatal shooting at an Oregon college, the conversation of gun control and violence is upon us yet again.
You do not have to look far to see how close the recent shootings on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon truly are to our Athens oasis. The shooter took the lives of nine students. The rampage started in an English class.
It is unfortunate that I am able to say this with tone of a tenured soul, but I’ve long wondered how many of these mass shootings, often involving young people, this country will endure before some true action is taken. To honor the victims is right, but the truth is that candles burn out and helmet decals peel off. To say that some blame must lay on the sensationalizing of violence in media and entertainment is also right. To claim that a more stable and funded mental health system would allow red flags to be raised with many of the perpetrators of these violent acts is true in many cases. But there is only one constant in all of these shootings — the weapon.
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The conversation of gun control in this country is automatically a political one. Will it already be too late when we all come to realize that the outcries about gun control in this country are rooted in survival, not votes? As a student, one who will one day want to peacefully enjoy an English class or struggle through calculus, I cannot fathom why more is not being done to limit the number of guns circulating throughout the United States. How close will it have to get before something is done? Or is the secret behind the lack of action that the problem is simply too large to do anything about now?
In a 2013 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, it was found that 41 percent of American adults reported having a gun in their homes. If it was reported that heroin was a household item in that many American households, there would be a national uproar and an attempt to clean up the blocks. In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 8,257 heroin related deaths in the United States. That same year, there were 11,208 firearm homicides.
Every way in which someone in this country, even in this world, dies matters. And while we search for a cure for cancer and do anything we can to soothe the elderly as they reach the end of their time, does it not make sense to do something to prevent the lives of thousands of gun victims every year?
I don’t want it to be any closer than it already is. It does not need to be. More students, teachers, police, that guy down the street, your buddy from the gym, the woman who scans your bags at the grocery store — none of those people need to be next. Gun control needs to stop being political in this country. That’s how we can honor those who couldn’t be saved.
Anna Ayers is a freshman studying journalism and finance. What do you think of gun control? Email her at aa183414@ohio.edu.
