#change something

So 26 people just died in a town of only 600 residents. THIS was the gun used to kill them. Lets talk about guns.

Earlier last month 58 people were killed and another 546 injured during a country music concert.The highest death toll to a mass shooting our coutry has yet had, when just last Year the Pulse had set the record at 49. And its not even just about the “Big Ones” The tragedies. The stories that make it to the news because of all the bodies, because of all the families. Its not just about events like Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech which shake us to our core - for only just a while. Its about the deaths due to gun violence we suffer every year, every day. A rate higher than any other devoloped nation.*

Clearly, we have a problem. Whatever the details I’m sure most leople would agree on that. The reason why we never see any action or change to rectify this is that no one agrees on where the problem lies - where the “blame” lies…Or how to fix it. So many people think one or both of the following:

1) “Gun laws”/Gun Control are about “Getting Rid of Guns”. Rather than restricting or revising access on who can own a gun, how fast they can purchase one, what KIND of guns they can purchase, and where they can be brought.

2) If we “got rid of guns” (or even implemented stricter policy over them) we would be subjugating ourselves to the threat of the government or police or the political left and/or the “terrorists”. There is some group out there, for who if we took your ability to own a military grade weapon would be waiting to pounce. A lot of this sentiment is entrenched in America’s history as a rebelling colonies against an English government. We have since had very a very individualistic culture and mindset which means we do not like having laws which tell us how to behave or what to do. And we call it freedom.

Possesing a semi-automatic military weapon is not about protection - its about paranoia. There is no reason why anyone should own one, and believing that you need to have the right to access one is the reason why the “bad guys” keep getting them. They’re criminal records were clean before they went on a mass shooting, so just checking that they were able to purchase a SEMI AUTOMATIC WEAPON.

Please look at the video of the Ruger AR-556 firing and ask yourself if our general population needs access to THAT for protection as opposed to a -say- a handgun. No. Holding out hope you will one day need it for some future rebellion is like building a cold war fallout shelter. It will not happen. Meanwhile - the day to day reality is that people are dying because people have access to guns that shouldn’t even be in a store.

It doesn’t need to be this way. The fact that other developed nations are not this way is PROOF that we as a country have a problem. And a “problem” is not unfixable. Unsolvable. We don’t just lie back and think “well there’s nothing we can do because if we solve the problem we’ll just be creating another.” We don’t resign ourselves to doing nothing. Changing nothing.

The reason we have so much gun violence is multifaceted but not insurmountable to face. And we NEED to face it.

People are dying and we can’t just say there’s nothing we can do about it.

How is life going? Hn, that does depend on which parts of my life I’m looking at. College and all this stuff is fine but I just can’t say life is going well or I’m fine. It’s just not true but I don’t think I should complain.I unfriended a friend who has new friends and doesn’t need me anymore. And I thought I don’t need somebody in my life who can’t appreciate and accept myself and the things I did and do for him. But the most important point was that I thought we were friends and friends are a part of each others lifes but he isn’t anymore and he wasn’t before I ended our friendship officially. So basically I just did it in a formal way and I’m tired of investing time and feelings in this relationship.

But it’s very hard to explain the dynamics of our friendship ‘cause we were friends for 3 years and went through a lot. People change, life goes on and maybe it’s time to move on and see what comes next. I wish him the best of everything because he really deserves it and I hope he will find people who fit better in his life than I did.I know it was really hard for him to accept my decision & I think he cried (I don’t know because I had to send him a message. We haven’t met each other for months although we don’t live far away from each other) because there were many spelling mistakes in his messages.