Argumentative Essay On School Shootings

One hundred thirty one people have been killed in school shootings since 1999, the year of the Columbine massacre (Cox, Rich, Chiu, Muyskens, Ulmanu, “More Than 210,000 Students Have Experienced Gun Violence at School Since Columbine”). These statistics have made people start to question if gun control in the U.S should be stronger. When considering gun control policies, people should think about school shootings like Columbine, shootings in general, mental illness, and the data comparing gun laws and the number of gun deaths in the United States to other countries. Though the shooting at Columbine occurred more than nineteen years ago, almost nothing has been done to curb gun violence. Even though the perpetrators, Dylan Klebold and Eric

According to the American Psychological Association only one percent of mass shooters are diagnosed with a major mental illness each year. Experts agree that only preventing people with mental illnesses from buying firearms will not do much to improve the statistics. This is obvious, since the majority of shootings are not caused by mental illness. Experts do believe that banning assault weapons and not allowing convicts to buy firearms would be much more effective (Qiu, Linda, Bank, “Checking Facts and Falsehoods About Gun Violence and Mental Illness After Parkland Shooting”). When compared to other countries, the U.S has a pretty high gun violence rate. According to the movie Bowling for Columbine, about 11,127 people are killed by guns in the U.S yearly. This number is significantly higher than other countries because for the most part, the U.S owns more guns than other countries (“America’s gun culture in 10 charts”). Michael Moore makes the assertion that one of the reasons the U.S is so big on guns is the fact that the news causes so much fear. In other countries the news is nowhere near as violent (Bowling for