To my respective lawmaker,
I am writing with the Students Act Now Coalition composed of students from across the country in an effort to get Common Sense Gun Control passed nationwide.
Gun violence rates are at an all-time high, most notable when from 1966 to 1975 there were only twelve mass shootings, however, in the first three weeks of 2023, there were thirty-nine.
Every year, an average of two thousand five hundred children are murdered by guns according to Everytown. Up until 2020 the leading cause of death for adolescents was car accidents, now in 2023 the leading cause of death are guns.
Whether it’s your classmates shooting your teacher or your classmate shooting you, students are no longer-and have not been-safe in school.
If this info is not enough for you, the fact is that seventy-seven percent of gun abusers obtained their guns legally. The continuous coverage of new shootings has fatigued the media and consumers alike, as whereas ten years ago every instance of a mass shooting may have been groundbreaking, now mass shootings barely get coverage and media attention.
When a student brings a gun into school with the sole intent of harming others, it wasn’t shocking. It’s just another day in America. The country has been desensitized to gun violence toward children.
The lack of inaction, the lack of urgency, and the lack of care that has been displayed is severely disappointing.
Students expect to be protected.
Safety protocols are nice and all, but the fact that we need them just demonstrates how the government would much rather put a bandaid on a victim that is bleeding out from bullet holes, quite literally. We demand that lawmakers:
Ban AR-15s and other assault weapons that use high-capacity magazines,
Ban the marketing of weapons of war to civilians,
Ban the production of kits that allow for untraceable and unrecorded guns ‘ghost guns’ to be made,
Prohibit the gun industry from working with dealers who do not run background checks and comply with other state and federal gun sale regulations,
Require gun locks to be placed on gun safes and that the gun locks are more difficult to open,
Actively encourage and require the safe storage and handling of guns,
Ban ‘ghost guns’
Require that all dealers and any other form of gun distributor, whether licensed or not, utilize background checks,
Implement and actively enforce a code of conduct for gun dealers that ensure to ensure they operate under good faith and within the bounds of the law,
Prohibit any person who has been in prison, a mental hospital, or any notable instances of domestic abuse or violence from owning a gun without a proper review,
Implement necessary security protocols in schools to protect from guns,
Actively encourage and promote the ‘see something, say something’ phrase in an effort to prevent instances of school shootings.
View the full letter at studentsactnow.org/students4guncontrol
Live, Laugh, Love,
Students Act Now
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