At approximately 9:30 am on Friday, December 14th, authorities were informed of a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, CT. By the time police officers arrived, gunman Adam Lanza had killed twenty students aged six and seven, along with six adults. Lanza also murdered his mother, Nancy Lanza, prior to committing the Sandy Hook massacre.
The Newton shooting was one of the most tragic events in recent history. A mass shooting is a tragedy in and of itself, but what was especially horrifying were the victims: twenty young children, whose lives had barely begun, and six dedicated school employees who sacrificed their own lives in the hopes of preventing further loss. The emotional wounds of each victim’s parents, brothers, sisters, and friends will never heal.
And unless, as a country, we choose to take action, the number of massacres and the number of victims and the amount of pain experienced by victims’ families will only continue to increase.
Shortly before the Newton shooting, Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, whom Lanza also murdered, installed a new security system that would require all Sandy Hook visitors to be buzzed in. This system, however, offered no resistance to Lanza, who was armed with a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle. This same rifle could hold magazines that fired 30 bullets each, rendering it the ideal weapon for a mass murder.
So why do Americans need access to assault weapons like the Bushmaster? That is one of the many questions asked of NRA President David Keene, who has been asked by New York Times contributors to explain to Newton victims’ families exactly why he is opposed to stricter gun laws. One of the common arguments against gun control is that bad guys still find a way to get guns, and good guys need access to guns in order to protect themselves – but in Adam Lanza’s case, the guns he used to murder twenty-six innocent children and educators were legally registered under his mother’s name and stored in his own home. Would Lanza have committed this horrendous crime if he had not had such easy access to such destructive weapons? We’ll never know the answer, but the question remains.
The Connecticut shooting is not an isolated incident. Last week alone there were public shootings in Oregon, Alabama, and Nevada. Yet the past week has also seen a dramatic rise in gun purchases, as reported by NBC news. A weapons store in Milwaukie, Oregon, reported the biggest sales day in twenty years; San Diego weapons store owner Charles Garlow has also reported an uptick in guns sales. In response to gun violence, citizens feel the need to arm themselves with guns, which is an assuredly dangerous response. No one – NO ONE – needs guns that have the capacity to fire off 30 rounds in a matter of seconds. At a bare minimum, gun manufacturers should be required to brand their magazines and all elements of their weaponry, so that they may be held responsible in the event of future gun violence, which in turn may encourage manufacturers to stop producing such violent and damage-inducing weapons.
In my AP Microeconomics class, we discuss consequentialist thinking versus deontological decision-making, and what values of justice correspond with each method of thinking. Deontological decision-making is based upon whether an act itself is right or wrong; deontological thinkers evaluate justice based on how individual rights, and freedom, are allocated, and is the premise for justifying gun ownership. Consequentialist thinkers, however, consider actions based on what results they produce; they value general welfare as a measure of a justice. To truly understand the argument behind gun control, one must be able to think consequentially, and understand that the act of selling and purchasing guns has a deadly effect, as proven by the tragedies in Connecticut – and Oregon, and Alabama, and Nevada, and Colorado. It is the interest of our Nation’s and the American people’s welfare – a people that has lost over ten thousand due to gun violence in the past year alone – to introduce and enforce stricter gun laws, in the memory of the many lives lost due to gun violence, particularly those who died last Friday.
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