Students die in America at a rate that is unprecedented around the rest of the world. To find a country that has more children killed by guns, you would probably have to go to one of those war-torn third-world countries. According to the Brady website, you are 26 times more likely to be shot at in America than in any other high-income country. 327 people are shot in the United States every day, with 117 dying. Every day, 23 minors are shot in the United States. Mass shootings make up most of the gun violence news, but only represent 1 percent of the shootings in the United States. The United States has 121 guns per 100 people, meaning that we have more guns than people. The United States makes up 37 percent of all firearm suicides. Over one million people have been shot in the United States in the last decade. In 2021, the United States had over 48 thousand deaths by guns. In 2022, we had 645 mass shootings alone. 90 percent of all firearms used in crimes are sold by 5 percent of the gun dealers. The majority of voters want tighter background checks. I have written several times on the 2^nd amendment, but I will not do that again right now. I am going to write about the gun problem that we have here in America.

Why do we have a gun problem? The first thing that comes to my mind is that we have too many guns. I am a prime example of that. I own 7 guns, 4 shotguns for bird hunting, two 22 rifles for “plinking”, and one pistol for home defense. I never carry a gun around in public. Even when I was licensed in Florida, I still didn’t. Today, you don’t need a license to conceal and carry in Florida, and I still don’t. More guns on the street to me only meant more violence. Have I ever been threatened so badly in public that I thought I needed to have a gun? That answer would be no, and I am 71 years old. Growing up in the 50s and the 60s, gun violence was not a thing that we ever talked about because it seldom happened. I don’t remember a single shooting growing up, and only one suicide. Guns were not part of our lives. My father had a shotgun that he kept in the closet, but it only came out to go hunting. I never saw anyone walking around with a gun at all. When I was a newspaper delivery boy, I delivered papers in a not-so-good part of town, and I was never threatened. Come to think about it, that isn’t true because one time this man walked up to me and said, “Give me all of your money”. My answer was “no,” and I crossed the street and walked away. That would have been about 1966. Most people didn’t own guns, and most people didn’t feel there was a need to own guns. The place to look at guns was at the sporting goods stores, not a gun shop. I don’t remember a single gun shop in the city.

Gun control is a very controversial discussion today, but it wasn’t always that way. Gun control is as old as the wild, wild west, and maybe a little older. Gun control was very popular in the South in the early 1800s. Most gun control was passed by the local municipalities and was very seldom challenged. In 1840, an Alabama court upheld its State’s ban, ruling it was a State’s right to regulate where and how a citizen could carry, and the State’s Constitution’s allowance of personal firearms “is not to bear arms upon all occasions and in all places”. That ruling affirmed the right to gun control.  Louisiana was a State that had a ban on concealed carry. When Kentucky’s Supreme Court reversed its ban, the State amended the State Constitution to give the legislature the right to regulate concealed carry. In the 1800s, state and local governments felt that control did not infringe on the 2^nd amendment.

In the wild west, people were allowed to own guns; most people did. People needed to protect themselves in a lawless wilderness from wild animals, “hostile natives”, and outlaws. When they came into town, they either checked their guns if you were visiting, or if you were a local, you just left your gun at home. Simple rules that people did not think affected the 2^nd amendment rights.  Frontier towns that did not have gun legislation were violent places, so most places controlled the carrying of weapons within city limits. They were not like the family-friendly farming communities or the eastern cities at the time. There also wasn’t the rhetoric that the only way to reduce crime was to have more guns. That is more of a late 20^th and 21st-century idea that I don’t think is based on fact. I think that more guns reduce crime crap is just propaganda.  

It almost looks like the more the federal government gets involved with gun control, the more dangerous America becomes. Why would that be? Could it be that it is easier for the NRA and the gun manufacturers to control the politicians in Washington instead of controlling all the States and local municipalities that had the power in the 1800s? I think many times the federal government is more about the money than the will of the people. The gun problem in America is a prime example of that. There was concern in America with the fact that there were 50 million guns in America in the 1970s after the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Today, we have approximately 400 million guns, about 1.2 per person. It seems that with every mass shooting the more guns are sold here in the United States.

I live in Florida, where we have had some of the worst mass shootings in the country. Just by coincidence, Florida is a concealed carry state. We hear a lot about the 2^nd Amendment in Florida. The funny thing about Florida is that when DeSantis talks, guns are not allowed in the venue. People can conceal and carry everywhere except around DeSantis. Trump's reaction to the shooting in Tallahassee was what I think of as just sad. He stated that “These things are terrible. But the gun doesn’t do the shooting, the people do”. He went on to state, “This has been going on for a long time. I have an obligation to protect the Second Amendment. I ran on the Second Amendment among many other things, and I will always protect the Second Amendment”. For a man who is such a believer in the 2^nd amendment, do you think you could show up at one of his rallies with a gun, let alone a concealed gun? The answer is no, and the answer would have been no before he was President. The NRA is the organization that fights for your right to be able to shoot children. When they have their convention, guess what is not allowed? If you guessed guns, you would be correct. Their lives are much more important than our children's.

We just had another shooting, and this time it was at Florida State University. 2 are dead and 6 are wounded. This has become such a norm that the news hardly covers it anymore.