Guns Before Terrorists
From 2001 to 2013, gun violence on U.S. soil took a total of 406,496 American lives. This astonishing number is more than 120 times larger than the amount of American deaths caused by terrorism on U.S. and international grounds. Even with this statistic readily available for politicians advocating for more gun control, this issue has seemed to have crept away, hidden behind the media’s shadow of Middle Eastern terrorist groups. It seems that terrorism has dominated every news station and presidential debate. It is true that terrorism is a growing threat that takes lives and promotes evil ideals, but if American citizens’ safety is our first priority, our society’s foremost focus should be on gun control.
What we need to do is turn around and point a finger at ourselves.
Democrats and Republicans alike use nationalism and unification as a means to make people feel safe and strong. One popular way of doing this, as we see with Donald Trump, is through hatred. I am not saying that we shouldn’t hate groups like ISIS or the Taliban, but all of the politicians in this race for the presidency are not focusing on the right thing. Americans choose to take the easy way out by pointing their fingers at terrorists. What we need to do is turn around and point a finger at ourselves. The reason that we can’t recognize our own faults as a country is because of the political agenda. There is a reason that politicians who receive money from the NRA ignore gun legislation. There is a reason that not one gun control law has been passed by congress. Shootings upon shootings are masked by the focus on terrorism outside of our own country. If these politicians really were concerned about our own people, assault rifles would be banned and there wouldn’t be more than 30,000 deaths due to domestic gun violence per year. There are only 16-74 American deaths per year caused by terrorism, with 2001 taking more than 2990 of the total 3380.
Although I advocate for stricter gun laws and putting gun control further up on the government’s list of priorities, I am not trying to invalidate the importance of terrorism. The big difference between terrorism and gun control is that terrorism stemming from the Middle East (and no, not “Islamic Terrorism”) supports an overarching idea based off hatred. This is not only scary, but something that needs to be dealt with. Although it is a threat, the staggering difference in actual deaths between terrorism and gun control makes gun control a much more serious issue.
The numbers are not the most important part, however. The reality is that gun control can be dealt with much more quickly than terrorism. All America is currently doing is putting money and work into wars that are almost impossible to win when we could be fixing our issues at home. On United States soil there have been nine jihad attacks since 9/11, while 294 mass shootings occurred in 2015 alone. We cannot keep letting media and politicians skew our view of what really is the most important issue. Focusing on the problems here at home are not only what should be done, but what needs to be done. Innocent lives are being taken daily. During 274 days of 2015 there were more mass shootings than days passed. We cannot keep ignoring the ever so prevalent and important issue of gun control. Moreover, international terrorism should not be the only thing on our mind when our own country is a mess itself.