Another day, another mass shooting spree. Surly by now, it's time for America to rethink its gun control laws and make the logical changes that other advanced countries have made. At the time of writing this article, at least 13 people have reportedly been killed and around 20 wounded in a college shooting in Roseburg, Oregon. How many more of these tragedies have to happen?
Ask yourself this, how would this killing spree have been possible if the killer didn't have access to firearms? If you're looking to murder as many people as possible whilst being at a safe distance to avoid being stopped, then I'd say a gun would be the perfect weapon for the job. So why are they so accessible to the public? "Guns don't kill people, people do" - yeah, people with access to lots of guns.
The National Rifle Association (N.R.A) are America's main advocator of gun rights and one of the most influential lobbying groups in Washington, they are believed to have over 5 million active members at present. They are an extremely powerful organisation that funds and manipulates conservative American politics by being one of the biggest financers in congressional elections. Whilst the N.R.A hides under the guise of 'protection' and 'freedom', they are actually protecting the gun industry to freely manufacture and sell essentially any weapon or accessory to American citizens.
The same old excuses keep being given by N.R.A supporters whenever a mass shooting spree occurs, they want to keep hold of their precious guns but none of their arguments have any real rational thinking behind them. It seems that their solution to the problem is to simply arm more people with guns! It's insane! It's like saying that the killing of any innocent child could have been prevented if the child was armed in the first place and able to return fire, wouldn't it just be a smarter move to remove all the guns?
How some of these military spec weapons can even be classed as for only 'home protection' is beyond absurd. I'm pretty confident that back in 1789, when they passed the law for the right to bear arms in the second amendment of their U.S Constitution, they wouldn't have had the advanced and sophisticated weapons that we have today. It's clearly an outdated law that needs to be brought into the modern era.
When the Dunblane school massacre happened in Scotland on the 13th of March 1996, it was one of the deadliest firearm incidents that the U.K had ever witnessed. It caused public outrage and two new firearms Acts were passed that made private ownership of handguns illegal in Britain. It took just one tragedy and nothing similar has thankfully happened since, so why won't America change their gun control laws? What is it that is really preventing them from doing so? President Barack Obama has already admitted that failing to pass "common sense gun control laws" was the greatest frustration of his presidency, so why can't even the most powerful man in the developed world make the changes? Is it that the N.R.A is just too dominant? Is it that their political system too now corrupted? Or is it simply that America is just a gun loving nation? Whichever it is, there will be no end to these mindless acts of violence as long as the weapons needed to commit them are so easily available to the public.