Commentary: What America needs now is laws that regulate guns

My Facebook and Instagram feed tonight is the same as everyone else’s. You’ve sent your thoughts and prayers; posted a graphic of the state of Texas with a heart; talked about how heartbroken you are for the children and parents; made a passing mention of the Black and Asian Americans who were recently killed in a grocery store and church. And tomorrow you will wake up, nervously send your children off to school, celebrate the end of the 2021-22 school year and take them to their baseball games tomorrow night. 

Granted, I will do the same. 

Perhaps, evil is winning at every turn we make. Of course, I imagine that depends on what your definition of evil is. It seems the measure of thinking about children eating their cereal in the morning, laughing with their friends on the bus and then having their education disrupted by a person with a gun is as much as we can tolerate. 

It’s the only thing that we can agree on that is too much. And yet, we sit at a computer, hoping that some lawmakers, who are getting their pockets lined by the NRA, will finally put something or someone before themselves (or their buddies) in order to make an unnecessary evil go away. 

While we wait, some of us will send our platitudes; others might call their congressman; some might gather together and march, but the reality is that we will continue to wait for simple things like background checks and banning weaponry because we are at the mercy of a system where the right to power is more important than the right to live a life without fear, manipulation and anger. 

I admit, there is not a simple fix here. The reality is that we can look to all of these circumstances: kids spend too much time on the internet, there are people who suffer from mental health issues, there is disinformation, we have dehumanized each other, but these issues are everywhere in the world. They are not special American issues that only we deal with. 

But, time and time again it has been proven that access to weapons, in this case, guns, particularly semi-automatic weapons, leave us with massacres like what happened in Las Vegas, Orlando, Sandy Hook, El Paso, Parkland and now Uvalde. 

Americans, who make up 4.4-percent of the world’s population, own 42 percent of the world’s guns. America has the highest gun homicide rate and the most mass shootings. And yet, unlike other developed countries like Britain and Australia, we have not passed stricter gun laws after terror strikes the halls of a school building, aisles of a grocery store or dance floor at a night club. 

The statistics are there, proving they work. 

But in America, where we are free and brave, it doesn’t matter what facts and data shows. It really all comes down to what it is that we believe is real or fake and how we can benefit from that.