THE INCREASING NUMBER OF GUN VIOLENCE IN U.S: A JOURNEY TO FIND THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION

The Virginia Beach mass shooting that took place at a Virginia Beach office on the afternoon of May 31^st, 2019, and left 13 people dead including the perpetrator have once again rocked the people of the United States of America and seized world’s attention towards the increasing frequency of gun related violence in the US. It was the 10^th mass shooting for the past 6 month of 2019, showing a slight increase in the number of incidents compared to 2018 within the same period of time. If there is no action taken, it is feared that the number will increase even worse as there were already 340 mass shootings in 2018 alone. Hence, it has forced the society and government officials to question what went wrong in the system and how to find better approach to handle the issue from the roots.

As varies as the motive behind the violence, various factors also held accountable causing and worsening the issue. Among other things, many continue to attribute the cause of almost every cases to mental illness, especially in the case of mass murder. However, although it is true at some point, according to a study, there are only about 22 percent of mass murders convict ruled to suffer from serious mental illness by the courts. Therefore, although mental illness do take part in some cases, it is not the main cause of increased gun violence numbers. Instead, there is overwhelming evidence that correlates the rate of gun death in a population with the rate of gun ownership where US states with higher rate of gun ownership also have higher counts of gun related homicide, suicide and ‘accidental’ death.

Although the large numbers of guns and ease of obtaining guns in a society is not merely the only cause of increased gun violence cases, but it is actually logical to consider it as the main contributing factor. There are many published studies that correlates these 2 variables, for example there are 6 different reviews published by Harvard Injury Control Research Center which concludes more guns means more homicide and a recent studies published in BMJ which found that there are more mass shootings in states with weaker gun laws. All these evidence leads to the conclusion that the higher number of guns are walking in line with the increased odds of gun related violence.

Then should guns be banned in America? As much as it supporting the logic where there is no gun then there will be no case of gun violence, it will be hard if not impossible to completely ban guns as gun can also obtained illegally. However, moving into a stricter gun laws is possible and necessary to do. Policies like firearm prohibitions for high-risk group, e.g. domestic violence offenders, persons convicted of violent misdemeanor crimes, and individual with mental illness who have been adjudicated as being a threat to themselves or to others, have been shown to reduce violence. Moreover, reducing gun diversion to criminals can also be done through licensing of handgun purchasers, mandatory background checks and stricter supervision on retail gun sellers. Of course, interventions and integrations through various systems, e.g. legal, community, and also health information, must also be carried out to succeed the policies which means it can be quite complicated to implement and might resulted in various opposing arguments. However, countries like UK, Japan, Australia, and Germany, have successfully implemented similar approaches and effectively reduce the number of gun related violence in their country. Therefore, taking the same approach is no longer a hit-and-miss situation in handling this issue.

Nevertheless, while the facts may speak for themselves, the issue of gun violence is extremely complicated and varied, and there will be no catch-all solution in this matter. But doing nothing and wait until all related parties agreed upon one win-win solution that can effectively handling this issue is also not a wise thing to do, though, it is more crucial to start with small steps and create even the slightest decrease on the numbers and work gradually decreasing it overtime rather than trying to find the ultimate solution for this issue.