On October 27, 2018, anti-Semite Robert Bowers opened fire on worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. With an AR-15 and three handguns, Bowers murdered 11 people and injured six more as they began their morning Shabbat services. As the nation mourns the eleven Americans who lost their lives in this hate crime, we can’t help but wonder why citizens are still allowed to purchase military grade weapons. Robert Bowers holds a firearm license and has 21 guns registered to his name. Among these is the Colt AR-15 he used in his massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue. Bower’s AR-15 was a semi-automatic rifle with a 32 round capacity. In nine states, there is a limit on the round capacity of guns available to the public. These states include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont, which all cap the number of rounds to between 10 and 20 rounds. Pennsylvania does not have a restriction on round capacity, so Bowers was able to legally purchase his AR-15 and rain terror on the lives of innocents.
We have seen on many occasions the devastation that stems from assault rifles in the hands of citizens. In the Sandy Hook shooting, Adam Lanza used three semi-automatic rifles to kill 28 people. At Stoneman Douglas High School, Nikolas Cruz gunned down 17 victims with his legally purchased AR-15. In Las Vegas, 59 innocent people were massacred by Stephen Paddock and his 23 firearms, a dozen of which were assault rifles. I could go on and on with examples of mass shootings that have occurred in the United States within my lifetime. But what do all four of the shootings I have mentioned have in common? The perpetrators had easy, legal access to semi-automatic rifles, and between just those four attacks, 115 lives were lost. American citizens should not be able to purchase semi-automatic assault rifles. Why would anybody need a gun that can fire 30 rounds in ten seconds if they are not in the military?
In 2017, in the United States, 15,643 people (excluding suicide victims) were killed by guns, according to the Gun Violence Archive. 732 children and 3,247 teenagers were killed by guns. There were 346 mass shootings, and a whopping 2,036 unintentional shootings just in the U.S. Those numbers are outrageously high. In comparison, in Australia, semi-automatic rifles were
banned after a 1996 mass shooting. In 2016, according to gunpolicy.org, only 238 total Australians died from gun violence. That means that fewer total Australians died from gun violence in 2016 than there were mass shootings in the U.S. in 2017. Of course, Australia does have a significantly lower population than the United States, so it makes sense for their number of deaths from gun violence to be lower as well. However, the 15,643 gun deaths in the U.S. constitute 0.0048% of the country’s current population, whereas 238 deaths in Australia makes up only 0.00097% of the population. The ratio of gun violence deaths to total population is five times greater in the United States than in Australia, all because Australia banned semi-automatic rifles after one mass shooting.
So what do I propose to end the United States gun violence crisis? First of all, the purchase of semi-automatic rifles and military grade weapons by American citizens must be banned. Secondly, there should be a limit on the number of guns one person is allowed to purchase. What would a single person do with 21 or 23 guns other than shoot up a synagogue or a music festival? I understand that people want guns for hunting and protection, and I am not proposing to take away all guns. I am saying that people do not need a gun that can fire three shots a second to kill a deer; guns with low round capacity will suffice. People will argue that owning whatever gun they want is their right, as spelled out in the Second Amendment. But the Second Amendment was written in 1791, a time when guns could not fire hundreds of shots in one minute. Also, laws can change; that’s why we have the Amendments in the first place!
Just last week, there was a weapons threat at Marblehead High School. A student claimed online that he was going to bring a gun to school. The next day, we all laughed about how we knew the threat was a joke, and we joked about who we thought had made the threat. But it should not have been a laughing matter. Shootings occur so often in the United States that very few of us are shocked whenever a new incident surfaces. As long as semi-automatic rifles are easily accessible to Americans, nobody knows for sure that they are safe from a mass shooting.