Opinion: America must move forward on gun control

By Jonah Zigman, GSS correspondent

PARIS — I’m an Oregonian, and I’m proud. Until I moved to Paris last year, I’d never lived anywhere I remember other than Portland.

Oregon is a pretty quiet state that is known for a few things: Free thinking and very unique people, good college football, and a wide variety of outdoors sports and activities.

What Oregon is not known for is gun violence.

On Oct. 1 in Roseburg, Oregon, Christopher Harper-Mercer, a 26-year-old student at Umpqua Community College, shot and killed nine people and wounded seven.

After engaging in a brief shootout with police, he committed suicide. This is the largest mass shooting in Oregon’s 150-plus-year history.

I went to Roseburg once. For maybe three minutes, I was in the city as I drove through it to get to northern California. If I didn’t bother to look out the window, I would’ve never even noticed it. Roseburg is tiny, with only just over 21,000 residents. About 280 kilometers south of Portland, it is fairly isolated from other cities.

As I left the comfort of Portland last year and thrust myself into the hectic cityscape of Paris, where I enrolled for a semester as a sophomore at the American School, I was told time and time again, “Be safe and watch out for all the ISIL members in Europe.” But back in Oregon there were students shooting at other students. Someone I know could easily have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I couldn’t help thinking that this type of mass shooting was a bigger threat than ISIL.

All that changed on Nov. 13 with the terror attacks in Paris. Suddenly, it seemed like I couldn’t get away from gun violence in this world. Both acts of homicide were completely different, with different motives, different methods, different targets. Yet both led me to an inescapable conclusion: Gun violence, no matter what the circumstance, is one of the most tragic and frightening things that we as humans have created for ourselves. And finding an end to these tragedies needs to be discussed — now.

As Americans, the fact is that we are confronted by violence on a daily basis.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, Roseburg was the 264th mass shooting in America last year. That’s an ugly number, given the fact that at the time of the shooting, there had been just 274 days in 2015.

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Additionally, data from the CDC and state department shows that there is a positive relationship between the number of guns per capita and gun violence deaths. This seems pretty obvious, but for some particular reason, whenever legislation concerning gun violence appears, people say that they don’t want change.

It’s as simple as this: Fewer guns means fewer deaths caused by guns.

It seems that in the world of gun violence, only the numbers of those killed or injured goes up, and ignorance continues to be the norm. Is it because we as Americans are scared of being attacked from within, and we want to distract ourselves with thinking the worst comes from an outside force of terrorism? Is it because we as Americans don’t want to accept the truth that there is an internal conflict within the country and its citizens?

After a major natural disaster like a hurricane, there’s always an immediate rush of people trying to improve radar quality, and better preparation for the future. After major transportation accidents, there is a push for new laws, and better designs for cars and trains. That’s exactly why there is a seatbelt law and new innovations are constantly being designed for these purposes.

So gun violence is just a totally separate category? There is an obvious issue with guns today, just like natural disasters or driving deaths. Why isn’t Congress passing laws? Why aren’t there large-scale protests? Why aren’t gun manufacturers coming up with new technology that limits the damage that weapons in the wrong hands can do?

I wish I knew the answer. I’ve been put into a constant internal debate on what the correct way of moving forward should be. President Obama is set to announce gun control measures tomorrow and I’ll be listening. Something needs to be done and people with authority need to acknowledge that.

—A modified version of this article originally appeared on ASPirenews.org, the student news website of the American School of Paris. Zigman is now a sophomore at Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon. Email Jonah at jezigman2000@gmail.com.