An 18 year old walks into a bar with their friends and a fake ID. They try to buy a drink, but the bartender stops them, realizing they’re trying to get away with underage drinking. They decide to go to the next best institution where they are legally of age to purchase something: a store that sells rifles.
From here, they can choose anything from going to a legal shooting range to going to an elementary school where the lives of school-age children will be in their hands.
On May 24, 2022, Salvador Rolando Ramos walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas having chosen the latter. He took the lives of 19 students and two teachers.
Except, we could have done something different in this story. We could have stopped it from happening. Ramos wouldn’t have been able to commit this criminal act if he hadn’t been able to go buy his AR-15 when he turned 18. Yet the law in Texas allowed him to, and in a way, the law allowed him to kill these innocent people.
It’s time to raise the legal age to buy guns throughout the country, prevent this from happening again, and save America’s youth.
In 2019, California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein proposed to raise the age to buy guns with her Age 21 Act, which would have created federal guidelines. In 2022, it was deemed unconstitutional to restrict access to guns, so her act was never passed. Soon after, the events of the Uvalde school shooting took place.
What made her act “unconstitutional” was the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, which states that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
This Amendment was ratified on December 15, 1791. It gave Americans the right to keep their own guns 84,166 days before Ramos used his on the students at Robb Elementary.
Except, in 1791, a militia was necessary to protect the community. At this time, the country was young. It hadn’t been independent for more than 15 years. It was younger than Ramos was when he brought a weapon into his old school. Men needed to have guns and be ready to defend their country if they lived on the frontier and encountered a threat.
Now, every town in this country has a police department. Shouldn’t that be enough to protect the people? Are guns really still needed for protection? Or is it time to take a closer look at what this Amendment really says, and at the state of our country?
According to American journalist Timothy Noah at the New Republic, the reason for gun ownership is shifting in our country because most people don’t hunt for sport anymore.
He said: “For reasons that have little to do with gun control and everything to do with urbanization and cultural change, the percentage of adults living in households where they or their spouses hunted shrank from 31.6% in 1977 to 15.4% in 2014.”
He also said that today, less than 42% of American households own guns, and 88% of those who have them say they’re for protection against crime.
We will never know if this is why Ramos bought his gun, but we do know that if the government had realized this amendment was outdated and had allowed the Age 21 Act to pass, we would never have to wonder.
In a heartbreaking statement, Noah said: “People used to own guns to kill animals. Now they own guns to kill people. And enough of them are emotionally unbalanced to cause serious trouble.”
In 2016, in an article called “Comparing Gun Deaths by Country: The U.S. Is in a Different World”, the New York Times said: “The death rate from gun homicides is about 31 per million people—the equivalent of 27 people shot dead every day of the year.”
In 2020, the CDC said kids and teens are more likely to die from a gun than from a car crash.
Is this really the country we want to live in?
Almost half of the school shootings from 2000-2019 were carried out by minors.
We have the ability to stop America’s children from killing each other. We can stop them from contributing to our country’s gun-related deaths. Let’s do it.