On Sunday, September 28, a gunman opened fire in a Mormon Church in Michigan, 50 miles north of Detroit. When he was finished, he set fire to this Church. Four have been confirmed dead and eight more are injured. This is the continuation of a dark trend we have seen throughout the United States in September. The Charlie Kirk assassination came on the same day as a high school shooting in Denver, Colorado. Gun violence has been a sickening trend in the United States starting in the late 90s with the Columbine Shooting. There must be a cultural shift to address this. 

Neither side is approaching this issue correctly. The left wants to ban guns: either completely or specific ones depending on how radical the politician’s position is. This takes freedom away from the United States’ citizens which is essential. The government should not have the authority to dictate what citizens can and cannot own. The American Dream is coming to America working hard and earning a living that allows you the freedom to purchase whatever will make you happy. Banning guns leads the country down a slippery slope where the government can tell American citizens that they cannot purchase anything that is deemed “dangerous”. The government should not act as an all powerful entity telling citizens what they are and are not smart enough to purchase. However, the right is not approaching this issue well either. “A good guy with a gun” as the deterrent to “a bad guy with a gun” is a fallacy that has not protected anyone from gun violence. If anything, this is proliferating gun violence, because it incentivizes people who would not otherwise own a gun to get one to protect themselves from bad actors. Additionally, it empowers anyone with a gun to use that weapon to stop anyone they deem a “bad guy”. This empowerment along with the current political rhetoric puts us in a volatile situation where any deranged person with a gun can undertake a political assasination for “the safety of the nation”.

This does not happen in other countries. For some reason, gun violence is unique to the United States. I cannot claim to know all the reasons that gun violence is such a pervasive issue in the United States, but I do want to bring another perspective to the conversation and this starts with the way that we are educated in the United States.

In United States history, learned in school, we are taught about the wars that the United States have been through. The one I want to specifically talk about is how we learn about World War II. World War II is taught as this battle for good vs evil. Hitler was an all evil force that needed to be stopped. The United States did not want to enter the War, but was forced to by the aggression of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. I do not want to discredit this. Hitler was an evil in the world; what he did was inexcusable and had to be stopped. However, the United States tends to skim over certain aspects of war. When talking about war, specifically, WWII we do not talk about the horrors that come from war. We do not talk about the estimated 70,000,000 to 85,000,000 killed in the War. We do not acknowledge that each of these people had their own lives, with their own families, and their own pets that they left behind when they were killed. We do not talk about the villages that were disintegrated by nuclear bombs that were dropped, whole families that were killed, and generations after that were plagued by the radiation that the bomb left over. Parents had to see the last pictures of their children from the front lines, and these were the lucky parents who had the gift of one last picture.

War has been taught to us as something that is justified and the killing must be done. This is most recently seen with the War on Terror, which “had” to happen to retaliate for 9/11 and ensure that there could not be another terror attack in the United States. When we are taught this, along with video games that gamify killing, and movies that glorify it, it is obvious to see how people growing up in this generation would be able to take a life or lives if they were given a cause that they believe justified.

This must change. A recent development is a bright spot: the country’s current aversion to war. After Vietnam and the War on Terror, which people see as forever wars that we threw millions of citizens at for the benefit of a few elites. People do not want to go to war because they have seen the destruction that it causes to those that have died overseas, and those that come back and are ravaged with PTSD for the rest of their lives. However, despite the fact that the nation is waking up and realizing that we do not want to send our people overseas to fight Forever Wars, we are still committing violence against each other through domestic shootings. 

Our culture has fallen away from the value of a life. We do not value lives equally. If someone disagrees with another person, we have created a culture where it is alright to shout someone down and call them names until they can no longer voice their opinions. Overall, this boils down to a respect problem. The United States individuals have lost respect for their fellow person. We have let people’s opinions, appearance, or abilities become their inherent value; losing the fact that inherent value comes from the fact that we are all humans and nothing can ever take this quality away from us. When we have the ability to degrade people’s value below humanity and add that to the violence glorification that is throughout our society, we give ourselves the ability to justify these killings leading to what we see today in the United States.

So, where do we go from here? We must aggressively push respect and kindness. We must approach everyone in this country with the respect and kindness that everyone deserves just from being a human. We are all in our own boat going through the same journey of life. This is the human experience. We all have this in common, and if we want to move forward away from this violence we must give each other respect and kindness due to our ever present commonality. This path forward will not only stop killing, but allow us to work together which will lead us to the best future that we can have, fulfilling the dream of “rule by the people”.