Transcription
As you're hearing a loud pop down the street, not fireworks, not a car backfiring, but gunshots. By the same time I finish speaking, someone's child, sibling, or friend will be dead. Not because of war, but because going to school, the mall, or even just walking home has become life-dangerous. This is not a distant crisis. This is America bleeding from the inside.
According to the USA Today on September 16, 2024, the report published by the John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence and Solutions analyzed the latest data of gun violence from the CDC, which revealed that more than 48,000 people across the country died from gun violence in 2022. Of those deaths, more than 2,500 children and teens ages 1 to 17 died by fire.
Today, I'm here to bring you awareness of how gun violence results in the tragic loss of life and injury and creates widespread fear and insecurities within communities. To help break it down for you, I'll break it down into three main points. One, I'll introduce the problems and tragedies associated with gun violence. Two, I'll introduce the causes of these problems. And three, I will provide large and small-scale solutions to rectify these problems.
Let's start by talking about the problems, which can be divided into two categories. The first being mass shootings and the second being the increase of suicide by firearms. By March of 2023, there already had been dozens of mass shootings across the United States. As the New York Times reported on March 28, 2023, that as of late March that year, the Gun Violence Archive had counted 130 mass shootings in the United States. They went on to state that the year before, the same group counted 647 mass shootings. And of those, 21 involved five or more fatalities. A couple of examples: on January 21, 2023, a 72-year-old gunman killed 11 people and wounded at least nine others at a dance hall in Monterey Park. And on January 4th, just four days after New Year's, the hopes and dreams of eight people, all in the same family, were killed in a home in what police described as a murder-suicide. The victims ranged in age from 4 to 17 years old.
Speaking of this, this leads me to our next problem, suicide. As highlighted in the article by The Advocate on June 15, 2025, when people hear the phrase gun violence, they really don't think about suicide. But suicides can be gun violence as well. Experts say it's a fact that is often brushed into the background in a country where gun violence is rapid. Gun suicides have outpaced gun homicides in Ohio for more than 15 years, according to the inquiry analysis of data from the Ohio Department of Health, where there were one and a half times as many suicides by gun in Ohio as there were gun homicides in 2023. That means that three out of five gun deaths were suicides.
Now that I've introduced a couple of problems associated with gun violence, let's discuss the factors fueling the problems across the United States. There are many, but from the many, we're going to concentrate on ease of access, stolen guns, and 3D-printed guns, otherwise known as ghost guns. The first is ease of access to guns. In the same article in The Advocate, they explain that a female, Tiffany Kimple, was passed down some firearms by her family. They were locked in a cabinet, keys kept somewhere she didn't even know. But that didn't even matter because her son, on March 18th, 2019, took one of those guns behind her house and around 2:30 a.m., took his own life. Now, we hear this type of tragedy in the news quite often. The family thought that the firearms were secured. Nonetheless, someone got a hold of them and committed harm to themselves or, worse, someone else, whether it be intentional or an accident.
Moving on to stolen guns. The Tennessean, on August 13, 2023, stated that stolen guns from cars in Nashville had jumped nearly tenfold from 206 in 2012 to a record of 1,378 in 2022, where even a police officer had his service pistol and two personal arms, all locked in a case in his trunk, stolen. And the article states that most cases of guns stolen from cars are tough to track down until they turn up months or years later when they're used in a crime.
Even worse than a stolen gun is a 3D-printed gun. USA Today stated on December 14, 2024, that untraceable 3D-printed guns and silencers, like the one used in the case of Luigi Manion, are increasingly hitting the streets as the prices of 3D printers continue to drop. The weapon was merely a novelty a decade ago but has become an untraceable menace in the crime world, as arrests related to 3D-printed guns have tripled in recent years. Federal officials have even recorded 25,000 homemade guns in 2022 alone. And, as stated, as the quality of 3D printers rises and the prices fall, the trend is not stopping. Even 3D printer kits are sold where the 3D printer is cheap; it comes with blueprints for a .22 caliber and the materials necessary to print.
Now that we've examined the causes of these problems, let's review some of the solutions. First, we're going to look at the large-scale solutions. Second, we'll look at the small-scale solutions. The People's Daily, in February 16, 2023, stated that in March 2021, the House passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, which means that you need a background check in order to get a gun. Bills passed like this, or even more bills passed like this, can help make it harder to get guns. Also, initiatives like the one brought up in the Philadelphia Daily News on April 9, 2021, by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which provide additional support to the Philadelphia Police Department forensics laboratory by adding agents to investigate violent crimes as well as assigning more intelligence analysts. Making a push for initiatives across the United States, and not just one state, will help, or shifting the resources will help gun violence from running rampant.
On a smaller scale, we, as the people, can stay informed by learning about gun safety issues and solutions, including research findings and successful prevention strategies. Discuss gun safety with others. Parents could discuss gun safety with their children, discuss the dangers of it, and we can even secure guns in a really secure storage, making it harder for children and individuals to grab them and reduce the risk of harm.
These are a few solutions for the problems of gun violence. But we can no longer afford to treat gun violence as background noise. Change doesn't come from silence or waiting for someone else to speak up. It comes from demanding better, voting smarter, and refusing to accept that this is just the way things are. Thank you for your time. Hopefully, I have informed you on the problems of gun violence. Thank you.