Mental Illness and Mass Shootings
Probably nothing in life is more tragic than losing a loved one, and with the recent outbreak in school shootings, one of the highest priorities currently is trying to find a way to stop them. Not to sound insensitive, but school shootings are nothing new, they have been happening since the early 1800s. But recently school shootings have skyrocketed. There are 3 basic sides, one, either people think we need stricter gun laws (attempting to eliminate guns), two we need to arm the teachers (fight fire with fire), or three, we need to help the people that are shooting schools that have mental problems.
From 2009, There have been at least 288 School shootings in the US, in the other six G7 countries, (The countries with the largest and most advanced economies in the world) Canada had 2, France had 2, and Germany had 1. Japan, Italy and the UK all had none. On the other hand, The US Places 11th in the world with school shootings. While most people think we take 1st (because we have the most school shootings), we also have more people than other countries with similar gun violence. According to Investors Business Dailey- “Norway is. With an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million” compared to the US at 0.089 per million.
Between 2010 and 2018 we have had almost twice as many deaths than between 2000 and 2009. Going from 106 killed in 10 years, up to 178 killed in eight years, and that number shows no sign of going down, many schools are adding armed guards to schools in order to make them safer but armed guards are not the routes school should take experts say “teachers and parents should be able to carry tools of self-defense in schools so that they stand a chance at stopping crazed murderers” “creating a criminal safe zone where murderers can operate with immunity isn’t working and will never work” Dudley Brown gun rights advocate.
Even though school shootings that happen because of people with mental health issues make up a very very small percentage of school shootings Ron Avi, from the University of California, said “If we’re really talking about prevention, my perspective is that we should go for the public health approach” (Card 2?) Trump is planning to go through with his plan to provide training to school staff with firearms, he also wants to “improve reporting to the national background system” backed by the NRA the NRA was a major contributor to contribute to his campaign and sympathetic towards them (card 7) “No matter what you try to do by just hardening the target we’ve learned that having the armed officers isn’t going to stop it” – Matthew Mayor.
We need to think about prevention, not reacting, he says. “Instead of waiting for people to be rushed into the hospital with the flu, you go to the community with vaccines we need to do a similar thing with gun violence” (Card 8) Reading these articles makes me feel safe because Delta is doing most of there policies and school safety right. we just need to be less strict about these things because he’s article show that being strict does not always help things like the safe so you don’t have to help though and having one armed guard is good because it feels safe, yet not overwhelming. (card 9)
People that have gone through tragedies like school shootings have very different opinions on the subject, wanting to get rid of all the assault rifles and semi-automatic. “you can buy a gun at 18 you had a brain is not fully developed”- Random Highschooler “they are should be chill spaces for students to de-stress”-Nathan 12th grade Chicago they say there should be higher taxes to make them (guns) harder to buy.
Mental Illness and Mass Shootings. (2019, Aug 12). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/mental-illness-and-mass-shootings/