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Gun Control: to reform or not

By now, most people living in America are accustomed to the not-so-breaking news of a  mass shooting. It’s a process that people now know too well. First, there’s a tragic shooting, which leads to grief, outrage and calls for action. If those affected make a big enough disruption, then maybe a piece of legislation gets introduced, which sparks a temporary back-and-forth debate between the liberals and the conservatives, and eventually people move on until there’s another shooting. There’s always another shooting.  

A small arms survey, facilitated by The Guardian, showed that there are 29.7 firearm related deaths per one million people. A study published by The Washington Post estimated that there are 88.8 privately owned guns for every 100 people in the U.S. with only Yemen, a war-torn country, nearing that rate with 54.8 guns per 100 people. Moreover, research compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center indicated that “after controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths…this [is] true not just with homicides, but also with suicides (which in recent years were around 60 percent of US gun deaths), domestic violence, and even violence against police.” 

The fact of the matter is, gun control will not be solved until a majority of gun owners come to a middle-ground; however, we as a nation have no idea what that middle ground looks like. Nobody wants their right to bear arms taken away, and few people actually want to completely take guns away, but interest groups have taken control of the conversation, and there is no clear communication between both sides. 

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