Thoughts and Prayers + Zero Action = Zero Results

Today’s shooting in a church in Texas made me curious to dig into the number of shootings that have taken the lives of so many innocent people - mostly the middle-class - this year alone. I googled to get the number of people who have died and who were injured from these barbaric incidents and I came across a mass shooting tracking website that has been reporting shooting incidents in the United States since the year 2013. The shocking thing is gun shootings are so common in the United States that we need the help of Data Scientists and Statisticians to help us track and analyze the number of shootings, the number of people murdered, and the number of people injured from these shootings. Sad but true! 

I am not here to report the number of gun shootings in America, but, tell me, how can we tolerate more than 500 people dead and more than 1500 injured by gunshots alone in 2017. Like, how are we able to tolerate this without doing anything about it? I absolutely understand if we couldn't take any action because we lack the funds to initiate any action. But, we are talking about the most powerful country in the world; we are talking about the United States of America; we are talking about the supposed number one country in the world. Tell me, why can’t we do something about it. 

In 2017 alone, there have been 377 reported gun-related incidents in America. Some never really got media coverage because sections of the media are not interested in covering gun shootings that lead to the deaths/injuries of only 3-4 people. Sections of the media mostly cover “mass”-shootings because that drives up the TRPs. Some of the media would rather spend 24 hours a day reporting the tweets by the rich and powerful people than talk about the middle-class and poor people senselessly losing their lives.

After most of these gun-related incidents, all we do is offer our thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. No one ever passed an exam with just prayers and zero hard-work. Even God whom we pray to wants us to do the initial work. Same way, our thoughts and prayers are not going to help us fight gun violence in America. We got to do something about it. I don’t know whether gun control can help us stop this violence completely, but it will prevent it to some extent for sure. Why must any lay person have assault weapons to protect themselves? The Constitution was written during primitive times in America (1791) when animals literally walked on the streets. At that time we perhaps used assault weapons to scare away animals. But that period has phased out long back. We no longer need assault weapons to protect ourselves.

Before today’s Texas church shooting, the Las Vegas shooting happened merely a month back which took the lives of 59 people and injured 241. The suspect carried out these attacks from the 32nd floor of a hotel room using fully-automatic rifles. That's the power of automatic rifles. The only action that was taken by authorities then was banning the sale of bump stocks that help faster firing rate. Is that enough? Shouldn’t we rather be talking about banning the sale of assault weapons of any kind to the general public instead? 

A few years back, these incidents were the ones we heard about on satellite television that happened somewhere far-away in a remote place, in a poor country. But this is no longer the case. Lately, these incidents are happening in the neighborhood, in a public place, and we hear about these incidents on local television. We could be the next victim because people like you and me are becoming victims of these merciless and bloody murders. It’s already gone out-of-hand. We need to take action before it goes out-of-control.