Seventeen dead, of whom 14 were students and three were instructors. Headlines like that have brought chills to my spine since Valentine’s Day, the day we supposedly celebrate love. On Wednesday, 19-year old Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Cruz was known to be psychologically afflicted. We’ve barely made it through the second month of the year, and we’re already at the 34th mass shooting* that the United States has witnessed in 2018.
Not so long ago, on Feb. 10, 2015, three students were shot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Two of them were NC State students, and one attended UNC Chapel Hill. The shooter, Craig Hicks, unsurprisingly, had a history of mental health issues, which were obviously neglected when he went to buy his weapons. He claimed that he had an ongoing parking dispute with his neighbors, but the victims’ father believes they were targeted because they were Muslims. Though we have rightfully honored Our Three Winners every year at NC State since then, it’s not going to bring them back.
The fact that horrifying events like these not only repeat time after time, but without any kind of action having taken place, is no less than gruesome. It pains me to even voice that gun violence is so common that I’m extremely scared it can happen to me or someone I love.
I don’t understand why a civilian — much less a 19-year-old kid — needs a gun. I also don’t understand how people can just walk into a store and buy a gun within minutes. According to the owner of a gun store a mile away from Douglas High, the whole process, including paperwork, of purchasing arms takes no more than 15 minutes.
Cruz, who had been diagnosed with mental illness and claimed that he heard “voices in his head” telling him to carry out the massacre, had legally bought an AR-15 rifle in Florida. He had posted something about wanting to be a “professional school shooter” last September. If this wasn’t enough, his teachers at school had mentioned that he had issues regarding erratic behavior. How could all of these warning signs have been ignored?
As the Second Amendment states, Americans have the right to bear arms. In my opinion, the best, most impactful solution would be to repeal it. It may sound extreme, but at the rate things are going, prohibiting guns will be more effective than strengthening mental health services and other weak methods like taxing weapons. Times have changed, and the common man does not need arms.
However, not everyone is for the movement of banning guns entirely for civilians, so it would be a tremendous step to, at the very least, thoroughly check whose hands a weapon with the power to kill is landing into and ensuring that only those who are authorized can gain access.
Mental illness can affect anyone on the planet, and it needs to be medically treated. The NC State Counseling Center on campus provides such services for students in need. Yet, for some reason, it’s only the U.S. that allows it be manifested into the deaths of other innocent people. For instance, in Australia, mental health issues among young teens are on the rise with about 22.8 percent of people aged 15 to 19 showing symptoms of being affected. But how many times do you hear of an unstable student shooting up a school in Australia?
It took Australia only one major incident in 1996, when a man called Martin Bryant killed 35 people in a cafe, to step up and enact one of the largest gun reforms the world has seen. There haven’t been any mass shootings since. In the U.S., there have been so many such incidents, with many more casualties, that it’s hard to keep count. It has become normalized. The same cycle repeats itself time and again — a mass shooting occurs, social media blows up, the world sends thoughts and prayers and we forget about the whole thing until another one happens.
According to NC State Campus Police, a few of the safety tips for dealing with an active shooter on campus is to leave the area immediately, if possible, and to keep yourself out of sight or take cover behind concrete walls, thick desks and anything else that can give protection from bullets.
Gun reform is more than required in the U.S. today. Citizens don’t deserve to feel unsafe in their own country. If appropriate action isn’t taken, this will happen again, and like you have in the past, in no time, you’ll be reading columns similar to this one.
*Editor’s Note: This column has been changed to reflect the correct number of mass shootings in the United States in 2018.
