Gun control has become a very hot topic among politicians and lawmakers in our country today. Guns are a great tool for sport and for defending one’s self when necessary, but unfortunately, they also have a multitude of bad uses that can make them very dangerous if they get in to the wrong hands. For places like Chicago and New York, the gun policy is very ineffective in what it aims to solve and there are much more effective ways for them to solve the problem they want to.

Many recent events have brought light to the issue of gun control in this country. There have been multiple shootings in schools, shootings in federal navy yards, and terrorist attacks of sorts that have made it appear that we need to heavily regulate guns or even ban them altogether. But this type of gun policy creates more problems than it helps. Most politicians are willing to say whatever they must to get elected, not because they dislike or intend to disrespect the people they represent, but rather because their job relies on getting votes. If people are rattled by a recent shooting politicians are inclined to jump on the bandwagon of more gun control because it will make the people of their district happy which will win them votes. With politicians acting like this it is no wonder that we are unable to get reasonable legislature passed regarding almost anything. The emotional involvement of people in major events like mass shootings often leads to cloudy judgement on their part making it easy for lawmakers to get people on their side of an issue. The problem is, lawmakers often use misleading information in an effort to change someone’s view. I will introduce three relatively recent mass shootings that have been used as major examples of why we need more comprehensive gun control.

Many people are familiar with the Sandy Hook shooting but not many people are familiar with the person behind the shooting. Adam Lanza was a boy who grew up in Connecticut, where it is legal to own and use “assault weapons” (NRA), and stole his mother’s weapons then murdered her. After taking his own mother’s life, Lanza headed to the Elementary School his mother worked at, Sandy Hook, and proceeded to tragically take the lives of six adult faculty as well as twenty children between the ages of six and seven years old with the same weapons. It was determined that Lanza committed the tragedy with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle and .22 Caliber Savage MK II-F bolt action rifle. Lanza had a childhood that was rather rough. At the age of 2 he was “referred for special preschool services” (Katersky). Early in the fourth-grade Lanza left the special education program because he failed to meet the speech requirements (Katersky). Shortly thereafter, when Lanza was in the fifth-grade, his father separated from the family leaving him especially emotionally wounded due to Asperger’s Syndrome which he suffered from. After his father left, Lanza went into a downward spiral in regards to his mental health. While still in the fifth-grade he submitted a book called “The Big Book of Granny” which was described as being “significant and violent” (Katersky). In the seventh-grade, Lanza was sent to a Catholic school. A teacher who taught him described him as “presenting very differently from the other children” with “very distinct anti-social issues” (Katersky). At this school, he continued to make very violent stories like he had been doing before. Another former teacher of his remembers that he would sometimes write upwards of ten pages on war and violence. While not uncommon for children that age to have violent thoughts, Lanza’s violent thoughts were much different from a typical child. His creative writing stories were often so violent and graphic that they could not be shared. The last major thing to happen in his life leading up to the massacre was a falling out he had with a close friend. He would meet with the friend a few times a month to play video games and talk about various topics. Lanza mentioned things to his friend like he had a strained relationship with his mother and talked to him about mental health and how the mental health of someone does not indicate the kind of person they are but rather something bigger going on within themselves (Katersky). But all of this went under the radar. 

The Virginia Tech shooting rocked college campuses across the nation by highlighting the potential danger posed by students with raging hormones and easy access to guns.  Seung-Hui Cho woke up on the morning of April 16, 2007 with a plan to commit one of the most tragic school shootings to date. That morning, Cho entered a neighboring residence hall and shot and killed a freshman and a residential advisor who attempted to assist the helpless freshman girl. Cho then went to a post office and mailed a package to NBC News that contained photographs and videos in which he boasted “When the time came, I did it! I had to!” (Johnson). After this, he began major portion of his attack. Cho strategically chose the building he attacked. It only had two exits on either end of the building making for easy covering of the doors. He chained the doors shut and proceeded to enter multiple classrooms brutally killing thirty-one people, including four professors and twenty-seven students, wounding six, and causing injuries to many others when they jumped out of the second-story window as he attempted to enter the room. All people who were killed were shot at least three times and at least once in the head. It was determined he used a Walther P22 and Glock 19 to murder all those people. Seung-Hui Cho was described as a “troubled loner” (Biography) who was disruptive and disrespectful during class and just downright weird. He was accused of photographing girls’ knees and legs in class and later accused of stalking two female students, neither of who pressed charges. Accounts from his roommates indicate he would hide in his room for hours and come out and say he was just spending time with his model girlfriend. He was eventually ordered to a psychiatric hospital but was treated as an outpatient allowing him to still be eligible to purchase firearms. He was a South Korean kid who suffered from “selective mutism” (Kleinfield) which led to him being bullied in school. So, he chose to become reclusive and keep to himself. In a creative writing class at Virginia Tech his writings were so violent that a kid recalls saying “This is the kind of guy that would walk into a classroom and start shooting people!” (Kleinfield). But yet again, all of this odd behavior went relatively unnoticed and untreated. 

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are two of the common names that come to mind when one mentions shootings. The two of them carried out one of the first major shootings to bring light to the idea of restrictive gun control. Together they entered their high school where they proceeded to ruthlessly murder fifteen students in the school using knives, shotguns, handguns, and attempted to use explosive materials of some sort. Again, these kids were isolated from most kids in their school. They were both bullied and shared an equally low level of self-esteem. Prior to the shooting participated heavily in gaming, specifically a game called Doom. They had multiple online servers where they stored their game files. Over time these websites turned into a personal blog of sorts for them where they posted videos of them learning to make pipe bombs and testing them as well as expressing hatred for the neighborhood they lived in but also the rest of the world. They believed they were better than other people and felt a strong need to prove that to other people. They both isolated themselves from the rest of their school.

Looking at the surface we see an obvious similarity is guns were used. These school shootings are prime examples used by politicians and lawmakers as to why we need more restrictive gun policy. The guns for two of these shootings, the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook shootings, were acquired legally while the guns and other materials for the other shooting were acquired illegally. When we talk about gun control we often talk about restricting certain types of guns. This type of gun policy causes more problems than it helps. Restrictions of the type of gun someone may own is effective at “making criminals out of previously law-abiding citizens” (Spitzer) and pretty much that. The arrest rates for guns do not go down a very noticeable amount when implementing laws of this extent because many people who previously owned one of those guns because they once were allowed to now are felons because they possess an illegal firearm. Firearm-related arrest rates in Chicago remained relatively equal after implementing their gun policy back in the eighties because people were getting pulled over with guns in their cars (Crime Prevention) or with guns on them because it had previously been legal to possess them. Now Chicago has the highest violent crime rate of any city. So, looking at the surface, very restrictive gun control is a great idea that can cause many people to feel safer, but analyzing it closer we come to the realization that this sort of mass gun control only causes problems rather than help. If we dig deeper into the shootings above a much bigger correlation exists. Cho was a selective mute who was seen by almost everyone he encountered as a strange kid with a very mean person inside of him. He was caught taking pictures of girls’ legs under his desk and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital as an outpatient for a short period of time. But despite all of this, he was still allowed to buy guns. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris both regularly played a relatively violent video game. Lastly, posted videos of themselves fake killing people in their school, setting off pipe bombs, and spewing their general hatred toward the world. Adam Lanza had a long history of mental illness characterized by depression, isolation from everyone around him, and a bad obsession with violence. His teachers brought multiple stories to the principals of the schools he was at because his stories were so gruesome they could not be shared with the rest of the class. A seventh grader should not have stories that cannot be read out loud due to how gory they are. But instead of being treated he was accommodated for his mental illness. He was given preferential treatment for a disorder that did not affect his cognitive ability making him feel like less of a person intellectually than everyone else. The doctors and teachers who handled him all recorded that he showed signs of autism, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorders, all of which worked collectively to distort his sense of the world and cause a big problem within himself. This caused him to respond with violence. 

So, how are all of these attackers connected? They all were mentally unstable to start. Mental health has the strongest correlation to the Prior to the shooting, Lanza was believed to have autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, and anxiety all combined with a strange fascination with violence. Prior to the shooting, Cho was seen as mean by everyone who knew him, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and had been planning the attack for an extended period of time. He purchased a gun on February 2 then again on March 13, passing the Virginia one-month waiting period therefore, his guns were bought legally. But he still should not have been allowed to buy guns according to how the. He was allowed to only because the judge who ordered him to outpatient treatment did not file the paperwork in a federal database that would be searched during a background check. Prior to the shooting, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris both exhibited signs of reclusiveness and violence, going as far as to make a video of them pretending to kill kids in their school called “Hitmen for Hire”, long before they committed their ferocious act. They acquired guns through a girl that Dylan took to prom, Robyn Anderson, who bought them from unlicensed dealers at a gun show. Dylan Klebold’s mother made a TED talk in which she explained the she did not see the signs her son was exhibiting and he seemed like a good kid who got involved with a kid who had a bad heart and bad intentions in the world (Klebold). From this we can see that mass attacks are not done because people have access to guns; they are done because people have mental illnesses and/or an inclination to violence. On March 22, a terrorist born in England drove a car on the sidewalk of Westminster Bridge in London, England and killed 4 people, including the stabbing of a police officer after running over people, and injured at least forty others. Two of the attacks mentioned involved guns purchased legally while the other one was committed with guns acquired illegally. People who want to commit an act of violence will do so with whatever tools are available. 

There is nothing we can do except stop the people doing these horrible things as they are doing them. But the response time of police is minutes giving a potential killer enough time to take out a lot of people. But what if we made it legal for everyone to carry a loaded gun or unloaded gun with ammo readily available? And for school officials such as the principals to have a loaded gun readily available? If Adam Lanza knew there were people in the school with loaded guns waiting for someone to walk through the door with guns ready to cause trouble he would have thought twice about committing such an atrocious act. And if professors at Virginia Tech had guns Cho most likely would not have tried to commit such an awful act of violence. If teachers in Columbine High School had loaded guns Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris most likely would not have attempted to kill all those students within the school. Allowing open carry would allow there to be many more people around with good intentions with their guns making any attempt by people who have bad intentions able to be foiled very easily due to sheer numbers. Some people may not feel comfortable seeing guns everywhere like that but that would fade once they realize that a large portion of gun-owners are law-abiding and have no intentions of doing anything potentially harmful with their firearms. 

Most people are very careful with guns and see the potential danger of them and therefore as a country we demand better legislature regarding firearms. The problem is there is not much that can be done on a government level to stop these kinds of shootings. These kinds of shootings are all dependent on the personality of the individual committing the act. Banning certain types of guns only leads to people who were previously law-abiding citizens who properly used their guns getting turned into felons. And it often just leads to higher arrest rates rather than lower, not coming as a surprise at all because of the logic behind the legislature. People who want to cause problems have little regard for the law and do not care for what it says therefore there is nothing we can do to prevent it. Even though we cannot prevent these incidents we can react with other properly used guns to stop the attacker dead in his tracks. 
