It’s sickening that we had to scroll through our news feeds after waking up on Monday morning and read about yet another horrific mass shooting.
The awful the Las Vegas massacre, which killed 58 people, was preceded by the Dallas sniper attack, the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, the San Bernardino attack, the Aurora, Colorado massacre and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. These senseless acts of violence happened over the span of five years – they aren’t the only ones, either, just some of the most prominent.
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Photo via Moto Club4AG Miwa/Flickr[/caption]
One hundred and sixty-five people were killed and approximately another 640 were injured in these six incidents alone. In each of these shootings, semi-automatic weapons were involved.
If you’re not disgusted by this, you should be.
We’re putting the focus on America’s unusual obsession with weapons, specifically semi-automatic guns. A large portion of our country insists they are necessary for protection, therefore we cannot make them illegal. They claim we are actually safer if there are more guns around us because that way we can take down an active shooter.
Tell that to the families who lost their loved ones on Sunday. It wasn’t a gun that saved them, it was a gun that killed them.
If guns make our country so much safer, than why are so many of our people dying? Why do people refuse to see that the statistics make their safety argument moot? Why are we so adamant about doing absolutely nothing to prevent these disasters from happening again?
We prioritize guns over our own citizens. It’s as simple as that.
Lawmakers are too stuck in their old ways to seek any form of beneficial change for the safety of our people.
Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly even had the audacity to write in a blog post that mass shootings are “the price of freedom.”
Sorry Mr. O’Reilly, but we don’t consider guns essential to our freedom. We consider freedom to be able to safely walk around without the risk of someone shooting up a crowd with a semi-automatic weapon.
This is supposed to be a “great” country, yet our lives are worth less than a gun.
The Voice is intended to best represent the collective opinion of The Setonian’s Editorial Board. It is written by The Setonian’s Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor.
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