6,023 children were murdered by some form of gun violence last year. How terrifying is that? We are not safe anywhere.

I read a story this morning about a newlywed couple from Ohio who had just gotten married in October. The woman was 22 years old and just a few days ago, she was killed by a man who came in with a machete while she was working at a Dollar Tree store. She had just gotten married and was planning on starting a family and buying a home. Now, those things will never happen. This is not a civilized society. Why do we have to live in fear every time we walk out the door? This totally devalues human life. Our society simply cannot live like this anymore. Sooner or later, something bad is going to happen. If we don’t solve this ourselves, somebody is going to come along and solve it their way, which may not be what we would like. There are two schools of approach on how to solve this problem. Both sides are partially correct, but they are also partially incorrect. The liberal left-wing school of thought says we must have tighter gun control. We do need to ban assault weapons and we need background checks, red flag warnings, and to have guns taken away from people who are acting dangerously, but I don’t think these things are going to fully solve the problem. The right-wing school of thought says it has nothing to do with guns, but instead the people behind them. After all, guns don’t kill by themselves, there has to be a person doing it. Unfortunately, they don’t really know how to deal with the people behind the guns. Their idea is to paddle people and bring the power back to schools. I don’t think that’s going to help a whole lot. In fact, it might make it worse because when you paddle someone, you’re teaching them that violence works and can be used as a tool. That’s the last thing we want. I think we need to have a combination of the two approaches so we can find a way to stop 6,000 children from being killed each year. We shouldn’t have to live like this. In addition, we need public statements telling people that violence is wrong and it isn’t a way to solve problems. If you feel like committing an act of violence, you should seek help. We need a hotline these people can call and it needs to be staffed by people who truly understand their psychology. These people need to be taught social skills and conflict management skills and we need to tell them that if they commit acts of violence, they’re going to spend the rest of their life in prison or be executed. I think people who are violent should be given job aptitude tests. Everybody is good at something and everyone has some kind of skill. That’s what we need to emphasize. We need to find out what they’re good at and help them acquire the ability to make that work.

Currently, our society is not viable. We need to solve our violence problem so we can stop living in fear. Sooner or later, our society is going to go down; my fear is that America will accept an Authoritarian government if they think that is the only way to solve this problem. Neither side I previously mentioned has a full solution on how to solve the problem; one focuses on guns, the other focuses on people, but neither is capable of solving this problem wholly. Banning assault weapons won’t completely help, prayer and bringing power back to schools won’t completely help. We instead need to teach the value of human life and how to improve social and emotional skills. A person who commits murder is a person with no hope. We need to give hope to these people and we need to do a lot more than what we’re doing now. People from both political sides need to work together to solve this problem because if we don’t, we’re going to wake up one morning to find ourselves living with some sort of Authoritarian government in charge where we don’t have rights anymore.