4 December 2018
Zachary Engelman
In 2017 The United States fell victim to 346 mass shootings according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. Because of this and data from past years, doctors are now referring to the gun problem as a health crisis — a term that should have been applied to this topic since the beginning.
Other countries with strict gun control do not experience gun violence of this magnitude. For example, Japan has banned all firearms and in conjunction to that, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Japan experienced just .04 violent gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2016, which is a shocking difference to the 3.85 experienced by the U.S. Also, according to this data, this kind of discrepancy can also be shown as true in other countries with strict gun control such the United Kingdom and Australia.
Despite these gruesome statistics, some people argue that gun control is not a solution. This very attitude has made the U.S. gun problem even more complicated.
For example, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearm and Explosives is responsible for keeping records for firearms dealers. The people in charge of this catalog are employees working at a small town public library.
Not only is this system strangely located and staffed, but due to National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbying, the dealer records are not legally allowed to be stored and or organized electronically.
The records are organized by a card-catalog system and cannot legally have a keyword search or a method of sorting by any specific field. Therefore, workers are required to dig through thousands of unorganized boxes when tracing a gun recovered after a shooting.
This system is desperately in need of revision, but whenever lawmakers attempt to fix it they are labeled as “pro gun control.” Groups like the NRA do everything they can to make sure these people cannot be successful.
Problems like this should be first priority in combating this epidemic, and these problems cannot be addressed if those involved continue to ignore the lack of gun control in the U.S.