Examining Bias Towards Weapons

Brian Torres Q2BM

Today in society, we constantly depict events that involve various kinds of weaponry as both good and bad things. We live in fear from these things knowing that any second, something like what you see on CNN and places like FOX News could basically happen right in your backyard. Throughout the past few years I have lived to see many events happen that have involved different kinds of weaponry. Some of them good, and some of them have been bad. Overall, I feel as though some of the biggest events that have happened have not only been bad, but have caused massive changes to happen in society.

One of those examples can be traced to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I remember coming home from school and my mom was sitting in the living room with her eyes set on the tv. I turned my attention to the tv and all I saw was all this coverage happening on a shooting that had just happened earlier that day at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. A man named Adam Lanza had killed his mother, taken her rifle and started shooting at people inside the school. In total, 28 people were killed and 2 people were wounded. After the shooting, gun control laws were questioned and still are questioned today. 

In a way, I feel as though the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting affected me in a way where I was more aware of my surroundings in the weeks following that day. I guess a reason to explain that would be because my parents and my aunt kind of instilled this idea in my head where I in a way became a little scared that it might happen to me or somewhere near me. So for like the next two weeks after this, I was kind of hesitant on taking any further public transportation because I thought something would happen even though I caught Regional Rail everyday on my way to school. 

Another recent event that I remember was the 2012 Aurora shooting. I remember this clearly because at around 2 in the morning, a friend of mine texted me and my phone’s ringer(which I forgot to silence before I went to bed) went off and woke me up. I got up and looked at my phone. Out of nowhere I see this text saying that my friend went to see the midnight viewing of “The Dark Knight Rises” and his mom took him and left the theatre because a news report came on her phone saying that some dude in Colorado had gone and shot up a whole theatre room during a midnight viewing of that same movie. 

The next day(well maybe about 7 hours after my friend woke me up with that text), everything was confirmed when I walked into my parents’ bedroom to see which one of them would take me to school. As I walked in, my mother was watching the news on the tv and the Aurora shooting was all over the news. Now I was upset because now I knew my mother(considering how much she exaggerates things) wouldn’t let me go the next day to see the movie.  I told my mom, “We are in Philly, that happened in Colorado, I highly doubt it will happen here.” I still didn’t get to go so I was pretty upset about that.

Honestly, when asked about which side of this issue I am on, I don’t really know what to say to them. Part of me is for open gun rights, but at the same time, the other part of me wants all this violence to end and for things like this don’t happen as easily and as often as they do. Already in this school year, since the school started in September, there have been 16 reported incidents in which a shooting has happened in or near a school in the US. What I find intriguing, is that the shootings that everyone knows about and that have a large amount of news coverage are the ones where a large amount of children/students die at or near the school. 

What about the shootings where maybe 1 or 2 or maybe up to 5 people die and the media just puts it aside, and yet we live in a country where we have one of our main focuses set on stopping violence in and/or around schools. Why is it that a man can go into a school and kill 28 people and the news is all over it, but what about the shootings where the shooter kills/wounds up to maybe 6 people and the families are practically left to mourn on their own for the loss but a parent of a child at a place like Sandy Hook Elementary basically has the entire country mourning with them.

Don’t get me wrong, I, like every other American, was mourning the deaths of the children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, but I just don’t think we should be kept in the dark about that stuff. I believe that when it happens, since it happens at or near a school building, no matter how many people get murdered, I believe the press should display the same amount of coverage over that as a shooting that they would describe as a mass murder. 

So, to conclude this essay, I just want to say how much all this has affected me, it affected me a lot. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting made me feel scared to take any excess public transportation, so I started walking from Suburban Station to school and the 2012 Aurora shooting got me upset because it was because of that movie that I had to wait a while to see a movie I had been looking forward to for almost a year. Again, like I said earlier, throughout the past few years I have lived to see many events happen that have involved different kinds of weaponry. Some of them good, and some of them have been bad. Overall, I feel as though some of the biggest events that have happened have not only been bad, but have caused massive changes to happen in society.



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