By Timothy Smirnov
Web Editor
It seems news of shootings in the days following the Newtown shooting have increased tremendously. At first, this came as a surprise to me. Why are there suddenly so many reported casualties involving firearms? It was an oddity I couldn’t shake off.
This question was answered when Slate, an online magazine, published a web app that displayed on a map the number of people that have been killed by guns since Newtown. Currently, that number is around 1500, 160 in the state of California alone.
I realized that it wasn’t a spike of gun-related casualties that had occurred since Newtown, but rather the increase of attention from the media to these casualties.
Gun related casualties are a daily occurrence that we don’t think about because we are not immediately affected by them. According to Slate’s map, 30 people died on Christmas, 57 on New Years Day and since we started this new semester on the Jan. 7, 762 people have been killed due to firearms.
The United States has the highest number of people who own guns in the world at 88.8 out of every 100 people owning a firearm. To put that into perspective, 15 out of every 100 Mexicans own a gun and 30.8 out of every 100 Canadians own a gun.
Gun violence and the issue of firearms within the U.S. is a multifaceted one that cannot simply be solved by only talking about it. One solution might be actively reaching out to our congressmen and representatives to push for stricter gun laws and harsher reforms. Another solution would be adding restrictions regarding who can own guns and making background checks tougher is .
I understand politicizing violence isn’t always appropriate, but it is important to understand that gun violence is a serious issue within our country.
Our society has never lacked violence and we will never live in a perfectly safe world, however if we don’t try our best to make reforms and fix the accessibility of firearms this issue will only get worse.
After the Newtown tragedy, gun violence and gun control have become hot topics. Every day since the mass-shooting there have been numerous reports concerning other fatal shootings.
In the days following the Newtown shooting, pundits and political news analyzers began asking questions such as why Adam Lanza did it, what mental state he was in and how he had access to the gun.
