Although this blog is not a platform for my political ideas I feel compelled to write something in light of recent events relatively close to home and I want this blog to cover many aspects of life, not just the frivolous things, but the hardships too. Life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, for there to be a rainbow there has to be a storm.
In school you’re taught journalists have to remain unbiased, not have an opinion and not influence their readers in any way: simply just give the facts. As a junior in college I applied to be editor in chief of the newspaper, a publication I had been working for since I was a freshman. I was also in the College Democrats club and during my interview I was asked if I could really present the facts clearly and were met with skeptical glances when I said “of course”.
It’s naive and foolish to think journalists don’t have opinions and it’s ridiculous to pretend like we don’t have them. Not having an opinion at all means one of two things. 1) That you probably don’t care or 2) you’re uneducated on the topic and don’t have all the facts in order to formulate an opinion and neither of these qualities would make a good journalist. Most people become journalists because they’re passionate about a subject or issue and they want to make a difference and that’s ok, that’s good, because that’s what makes good stories and brings the passion and insight that is so necessary in this field.
That’s why, against what I’ve been taught, I have to say that guns are a real problem in America and I strongly believe that the only solution is to implement change and have control over them. I saw a headline today in the Onion that said: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” and it caught my eye. When a satirical news site such as the Onion writes an article that very accurately describes the way in which this country is dealing with an issue you know that something is wrong.
Today two journalists in Virginia were killed on air by a disgruntled employee who then later killed himself. The very fact that something like this can happen is not only terrifying, but wrong, and could have been avoided in so many ways. How many “incidents” have to occur for us to see that this is a real problem? How many children have to be murdered, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. I’m not going to sit here and tell you what to think, but let’s look at the facts.
This year alone, only eight months in, there have been over 30,000 gun-related incidents and over 8,500 deaths. 221 incidents involved mass shootings, 486 involved children and nearly 2,000 were under the age of 17. How many Virginia Tech’s, Sandy Hook’s and Columbine’s do we need before we, as a nation, wake up and address this problem? How do we live in a society where journalists can be killed live on air by an unstable and disgruntled former employee?
Gun violence in the US is far higher than any other rich country. This is not the norm and we can’t grow accustomed to it any longer.
Banning guns entirely is not the answer, with 40% of homes in America owning guns there are too many on the street for that to feasibly work. There are steps we can take to overcome this such as better background checks, taking military-grade weapons off the streets, and improved enforcement. I don’t know what the right answer is but I know something has to be done. I don’t want to wake up to stories of journalists being killed on air and I don’t want to read about any more school shootings where lives were tragically cut short. This storm has been going on long enough and it’s time to end it.
