Three hundred forty-nine. This is the number of shootings in Chicago within the first thirty-one days of the New Year. Fifty-three of those victims lost their lives, two out of the fifty-three were past classmates of mine. There have been more shootings in 31 days than, in many cases, there are students who graduate from a single senior class. Without a solid solution, it can only get worse from here.
The city of Chicago is not the only victim of this plague that is gun violence. In 2015, according to shootingtracker.com, there were 355 mass shootings throughout the USA, according to shootingtracker.com a rough definition of a mass shooting is a single incident where four or more people are killed or injured. Based on this definition, it is safe to assume that at the very least, 1,420 people, were either wounded or lost their lives as a result of gun violence. According to a chart titled “Mass Shootings-2015” on gunviolencearchive.org, in many cases there were more than four victims to the shootings, making the actual number of victims far greater.
Let us take a moment to synthesize, and reflect on both the mass shootings across the US along with the number of shootings in Chicago last year alone. According to Chicagotribune.com’s monthly shooting report, there were 2,987 shootings from Jan.1, 2015 until Dec. 31, 2015. 2,987, just thirteen away from three thousand even. Take the number of shootings with less than four victims in the city of Chicago, and add it to the estimate of 1,420 of victims of mass shootings across the US and you get roughly 4,407. That is about 4,407 people who have either been injured or lost their lives in 2015 due to gun violence. Keep in mind, this is only a reflection of one city’s shootings with less than four victims, and the number of reported mass shootings.
Now that the problem has been acknowledged, the next question is, how do we resolve it? How do we decrease the number of shooting victims? What precautions should be taken?
Honestly, there does not seem to be any answer that does not qualify as unconstitutional. The safest thing to do would be to get rid of guns, with an exception of those in law enforcement but, even that is a bit sketchy. This is very unlikely seeing how the right to bare arms is inscribed into the constitution.
Although, just last year, I had stumbled upon two separate videos on facebook, both surprisingly offer the concept of using fingerprints to lock or disengage a firearm. The first video, titled “Has this 18-year-old Created the World’s Safest Gun?” Eighteen-year-old Kai Kloepfer, created a prototype firearm with a sensor built into the handle, the sensor is used to initiate and disengage a “second safety”. The sensor is activated by the fingerprint of the owner of the firearm, I use the term second safety because the firearm disengages and will not fire when an unfamiliar fingerprint is recognized. Kloepfer makes a reference in the interview to the students of the Columbine massacre of 1999, where two students used their parent’s firearms and opened fire in their school, his invention aims to prevent such incidents and many others. The article, “Has This 18-Year-Old Created the World’s Safest Gun?”, on uproxx.com goes in to greater detail on the invention, as well as the reason and goal behind the concept.
Much like Kloepfer’s smart gun, the second video, posted by Amazing Science, which can be found on YouTube.com under the name “Identilock- Smart Technology to Gun Safety” was of acompany who had invented a biometric lock for firearms, known as ‘identilock’. Identilock uses a biometric lock which fits around the firearm’s trigger,completely covering all access to the trigger, making it impossible to fire. Much like the smart gun, the only way to unlock the gun is through the use of a fingerprint. The fingerprint of the owner sets their fingerprint, and only that fingerprint can unlock the gun. Unlike the smart gun, identilock allows the registry of multiple fingerprints, but uses a “super user” to regulate the access the of the other users. For more information visit getidentilock.com.
Though both concepts are brilliant, and have the potential to work wonderfully in the reduction of gun violence. There has to first be a way to clean the streets of all of the illegal weapons. These are strategies that would be implemented by the law and licensed gun dealers, but what is to be done about the illegal distribution of firearms?
Should the country be allowed to violate the constitution in order to clean the streets of all the illegal weapons? Or do we increase gun restrictions and laws, with hopes that it will solve the problem of illegal distribution? Maybe the only way to fix the problem is to amend the second amendment.
Coincidentally, as I sat at my laptop and wrote this article, someone opened fire about a block from my house.