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Gun Safety vs. Constitutional Rights
Second Amendment Sanctuary Cities
A History of Gun Control in America and the Fever of Firearms Affirmations Gripping the Nation
Two teenaged boys opened fire at their high school with semi-automatic weapons on April 20, 1999; they killed thirteen, wounded twenty-one, and then turned the guns on themselves. This is the first I remember hearing of a mass shooting. There were nine in the United States prior to the Columbine High School Massacre, however, with the earliest in 1949, and there have been eighteen since. Thirteen were killed in the first mass shooting in Camden, New Jersey with a semi-automatic pistol and, in total, five hundred and eleven Americans have lost their lives while another eight hundred and twenty-two have been injured by bullets fired by mass shooters over the course of seventy-one years. These numbers are staggering and it is no wonder why legislators at the local, state, and federal level have felt compelled to do something, anything, about gun violence in the United States. Particularly since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting where twenty-seven school aged children and their teachers lost their lives in 2013, the public cry for gun control in the country has escalated from a heated conversation to a belligerent roar demanding that…
