Around this time last year, as most of us were trying to survive the last few weeks of a mundane winter and prepare for a much awaited spring, one family was trying to survive a senseless tragedy and prepare themselves for a life without someone they loved.
On February 12th 2013, University of Maryland student and my third cousin, Stephen Rane, was shot and killed by one of his roommates at his off-campus house. Another one of his roommates was also shot, but not fatally. Stephen was 22 years old.
He was a senior English and Linguistics major and recently got back from studying aboard in Ireland. He was 22 years old, months away from graduating and starting his life.
The shooter, Dayvon Maurice Green, was diagnosed with a mental illness the year before. And on January 18th 2013, he walked into a gun store and legally bought a .22 caliber rifle. If someone with a mental illness can walk into a store and leave that same day with an automatic weapon—no questions asked, no background check–our system is flawed. Whether you are a strong believer in the 2nd amendment or you think all weapons should be banned, you must admit that something is wrong and something has to be done.
One of the big arguments coming from the second-amendment-supporters is that “guns don’t kill people; People kill people”. And yes, guns do require someone to pull the trigger, but if Green came after his roommates with a knife would one of them be dead right now? Would a classroom of innocent children or a movie theater full of unsuspecting and undeserving people be dead if the killers came in with baseball bats? The answer is most likely no. These things would have different outcomes if automatic weapons were not on the market.
That being said, I think we are past the point of banning automatic weapons since there are already too many out there in circulation. But it’s not too late to reform the system. No one with a diagnosed mental illness should be able to get their hands on a gun as easily as Green did. There should always be, regardless of the person, extensive background checks and waiting periods to prevent people from making radical decisions in a moment of rage or out of a feeling of hopelessness.
Some may argue that the majority of gun owners are responsible and sane and therefore should not have their rights taken away or even limited due to a handful of insane citizens. And most of those responsible gun owners will tell you that the reason they have a gun is to protect themselves. Everyone should have the right to defend themselves, but if we are able, through reform, to take the guns out of the hands of dangerous people than no one would need a gun for protection in the first place.
Forget about the large-scale tragedies for a moment and think of all the people who die from guns as a result of gang violence, most of them teenage kids. Their stories don’t even make the news. Think of all the kids that die because they found mommy and daddy’s gun in the closet (though that might be a different issue entirely). The point is countless lives could be saved if people would wake up and speak up.
We live forty-five minutes from Philadelphia, but for most of us it might as well be a thousand miles because we feel so far away from all the tragedies. Despite what the last few years has taught us—that gun violence doesn’t limit itself to improvised cities, but can happen anywhere; we still think it won’t happen to us, not here. And that’s the attitude so many Americans have, including politicians that thinks it’s not worth the fight. But every life is valuable. And the direct victims aren’t the only causalities. Their family and friends suffer too, some irreparably.
We don’t have to live in a world where when going to school you risk the chance of getting shot by your classmate. We don’t have to live in a world where when you see someone reaching in their pocket your mind automatically jumps to the possibility that they could be pulling out a gun. A lot of things other than just guns contribute to this issue: mental illness, a lack of people reporting suspicious behavior, violent video games and just the media’s portrayal of violence in general. But if we want to put an end to these tragedies we have to start somewhere. And gun control is has good a place as any. After all it wasn’t just a person who took Stephen Rane’s life, it was also a gun.