Blog post #2 Gun violence

Hello again. My name is Soledad Alfaro-Allah for english class we have to become agents of change in the world. We had to find a world issue and try to help raise awareness for that issue. If you have been following my blog you will know that my issue is gun violence. I have conducted an interview with my Four year old, 13 year old and 12 year old brothers, and also my 10 year old sister. I talked to them about their daily lives and how they feel about v

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iolence, how they handle violence and how they think it should be dealt with.  Urban dictionaries idea of violence says otherwise. The reason I decided to look up the urban dictionary is because even though it is perceived as a sort of satire of how we think it is also true to an extent. While interviewing my siblings they had brought up some very interesting points. Such as I asked my four year old brother “what do you do if you see/experience violence, and he simply told me “I tell the teacher, if she’s not there I put up my hand and say please stop hurting me.” This is his solution to all the troubles of violence. When I asked him about guns he said “Only people with responsibilities should have them” I was shocked to hear this from my four year old brother who can barely spell the word responsibility. I asked him why and he said “because they can keep us safe”. I then proceeded to ask him, who do you think should have this responsibility?

He said “Nice people.” Nice people. It was as simple as that. We should give them to nice people with responsibility. But who do we classify as competent to handle such a hardcore burden? Officers? People who have been trained already? Or should we train new people, like teachers and parents. Or does no one get them all together? These are questions that carry the burden of even bigger questions on top of one another. Obama has recently signed into law 23 which will make it harder to get bullets and limit the number of bullets per clip, and are talking about universal background checks. The biggest obstacle is the opposing views of the massive amounts of republicans that are pro guns in congress. Something that has stuck with me through listening to the radio show was when obama says “ we can only make change if the american people demand it.” and when he said this he was speaking on the fact that we cannot depend on a select number of people to solve our problems for us, and when things don’t turn up our way blame it on the government, because in the end we will end up producing chaos. Many opinion pieces have been launched about this topic. Gun violence is being compared and connected to several issues. Such as health care. In the most recent shooting all the subjects have been established as “mentally ill”. Another popular reasoning in congress for gun violence is depression. Particularly teen depression. Apparently there is an increasing amount of teen suicides and homicides involving firearms. We are looking for something to blame. Personally, I think that we are the ones to blame and the reason for that is we are in denial and fearful of this topic that we choose to ignore the trouble that it is causing in the daily lives of many. We are putting our own comfort selfishly over the necessary closure of dozens of families, and victims.