Recent incidents reignite gun control debate
Investigators remove the body of the alleged shooter near the Empire State Building Friday. A disgruntled former employee at a women's apparel shop shot a former co-worker before being killed by police.
Two gun-related incidents -- a series of shootings in Chicago on Thursday night and a confrontation between a gunman and New York City police officers, which wounded bystanders, after a shooting outside of the Empire State Building on Friday morning -- have received heavy coverage by the media this week, adding to growing concerns by some about the lack of a national conversation about gun control policy.
“New York City is the safest city in the country, but we are not immune to the national problem of gun violence,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a press conference regarding the Empire State Building shooting on Friday morning.
In approximately the past month, media coverage has been filled with stories about gun-related violence throughout the nation.
On July 20, a gunman killed 12 people and injured 58 others during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo.
On Aug. 5, another mass shooting occurred in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., when a gunman killed six people and injured three others.
On Aug. 13, a gunman killed a police officer and a civilian in a shooting in College Station, Texas, near Texas A&M University.
In light of these recent events, concern over gun violence and gun control policy seems to have increased among members of the public, including college students.
“I think it’s a problem, especially with everything in the news these days. People walk into movie theaters and walk on the sidewalks and they can just pull a gun out of nowhere. Too many innocent people are affected by the violence. Something needs to change,” said Boston University junior Amanda DiMeo.
According to some, gun violence is as big of a problem now as ever and the increased media coverage has only made the public more sensitive to it.
“I think gun violence has always been taken into consideration,” said BU junior and Chicago native Lyanne Santana. “It’s a serious problem in Chicago, but I think it’s different here because it’s gang related. I feel like shootings here aren’t seen as tragedies [by Chicago residents] because we’re desensitized. They’re isolated events between gangs.”
“I don’t think the country is any more or less trigger happy than it has been in my lifetime,” said McGill University junior Noah Tavlin. “Coincidentally -- and I do believe it is a coincidence -- a number of highly-publicized, tragic mass shootings have occurred in an unusually short amount of time. I think this is making, or should make, people more sensitive to the issue. Gun violence in the U.S. has actually been a problem for a very long time, if you hold us to an international standard and compare gun violence in the U.S. to other countries.”
People are also more concerned about gun violence when it hits close to home, according to Santana.
“For example, the BU shooting scared us. It caught us off guard. We had always thought, ‘Not in our community,’” she said, recalling the gun-related murder of a graduate student in April. “I don’t think people truly care unless their personal safety is threatened. With the shooting in Aurora, that was a big deal because people thought, ‘I go to the movies sometimes,’ and they got scared at the randomness of it.”
Nevertheless, whether gun violence has actually increased or not, there has been talk of hopes for a change in gun control policy.
“It’s not OK that there are people who are not mentally fit to possess guns and do anyway. It seems like people are using gun violence as a way to make themselves heard and if we continue along this way, it will only get worse,” said DiMeo.
“I believe that responding to gun violence with looser gun restrictions -- like allowing people to carry weapons in public -- as a means for people to protect themselves, is to respond to violence with more violence,” said Tavlin. “Making guns more widely available in order to combat gun violence is counterintuitive. It’s a microcosm of the very American notion that to bring democracy, freedom and peace to foreign nations, we must start wars.”
To date, neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney has made a clear stance on gun control policy. Some, however, remain hopeful that they will.
“The concurrence of these shootings with the upcoming election will hopefully make gun law reform an important question in the upcoming election,” said Tavlin. “To say that nothing has to change is to be ignorant. Gun violence is a problem any way you look at it and inaction will not bring about change.”
Olga Khvan is a Fall 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.
This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.