So recently, the US has had some terrible shootings going on and since then, there have been protests going on to improve our gun control laws here in the US but this isn’t the first time gun control has been an issue. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1791 when the Bill of Rights was signed, and in it was the 2nd Amendment which gave people the right to bear arms, in other words, to have the right to own a gun. And since then, people have been debating whether or not they should ban guns, or put new gun control laws to the country, like for example the background check which I’ll go through later. So what is my point to all of this? Well, I want to know why gun violence is such a big problem here in the US, and why Gun Control laws are being made. I also want to answer some of my big questions about gun violence, like “How bad is the US with gun’s”, and “Why would people do these crimes”?

So to start things of, “Why is gun violence such a big issue here in the US”? Well CNN have done a study on this topic back in March 9, 2018 in which they compared the United States gun culture to the entire world. The article was called “How US gun culture compares with the world in five charts”, and according to some of the information they had, the United States gun homicide rates are 25.2 times higher than any other high-income countries. Another fact about the US is that they own more guns per person than any other country in the world. They do talk more about it on the article but those are some of the examples that I’ve found.

Gun violence has always made me wonder why this is a problem, so here are my thoughts on this. I do think that gun violence is a big problem for us here in the US because there have been a lot of gun related incidents that have happened recently. According to a website called “Gun Violence Archive”, I saw a chart that showed the many incidents that happened in US in 2018 that were related to Gun Violence, and I found out that there has been a total of 16,580 Incidents with the number of Deaths being 4,200, and Injuries being 7,361. And all of this is from January 1 through April 18. It's crazy to see the number of incidents that have happened over the last few months of this year. This is were gun control comes in, and I think that this might help with our gun violence a little bit by reducing gun related crimes. I don’t think that gun control will get rid of gun violence for good. Remember, we still have our 2nd Amendment rights, which is the right to bear arms. Getting rid of our guns means were getting rid of our own rights, though the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give us unlimited rights to own a gun but I still don’t think gun control can get rid of gun violence, I think it will only reduce it.

I do have this one question about gun violence, “Why do people do this?”. Why would someone do this act of violence to people. Well there are some reasons to this. One would be that they were just defending themselves from an intruder. Another one would be that it was an accident, being that you just accidently pulled the trigger, but those are small ones. However I don’t understand some people's reasons at to why they would start a mass shooting. Well there are some answers to that with the most common one being that the shooter is mentally ill. I does make a bit sense once you think about it, and look back at his medical history. Another common thing as to why people start shootings is Alcohol, and substance abuse. According to this website “ScienceDirect”, they say that substance abuse is a widespread public health concern, and that I has brought attention to many. There does exist some solutions to stopping these kinds of people. One way is to have a backup check when someone is purchasing a gun. This can help because people can look at a person's background info if they have any criminal records, or health issues, and doing could lower the risk of a shooting to happen, though there is a problem to this. One problem is that they can look into your personal info, which can violate some people's rights. Though the people that are looking at that person's background information doesn’t need to look at all of their info.

So I do think that gun violence is a big issue for americans, because after looking at the number of death, and injuries that have happened this year, and the reason as to why people are doing this, I think this is something we can’t ignore. There are ways of preventing this like making new gun control laws, and the background check but they do have there negatives. Though I didn’t go into that much detail in my opinion, I think you may have an idea of what i’m talking about. I’m sure there are other people out there that have made their own opinion on this problem but that’s just my thoughts. I’m sure one day the world will change with new gun control laws going on all around the states, and making our much more safe, but were going to have to wait on that. It’s probably going to take years for a big change to happen, but I digress.