WiNK

The Half-Mast Flag

by: Max Porter

For what has seemed to be most of this and the latter half of last school year, the American flag on Wooster's campus (and flags throughout the state and country) has been at half-mast. Sitting somberly against the pole, the wind does not affect it and it sits still. The flag has been down for the majority of our time spent on campus during the school year not just because annual events that require this action, such as Martin Luther King Day, the anniversaries of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, or to honor the lives of public servants (for example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or local a firefighter or police officer killed in the line of duty). No, something more is occurring to cause this.

Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14th, 2012, gun sales have been on the rise. But since the Coronavirus became a pandemic in the United States in March of 2020, gun sales have grown exponentially with around one million being bought by Americans every week (a record), many of them first-time purchasers. Although many of these purchases have been for valid reasons (including fear of civil war as the 2020 presidential election neared and the unknown nature of the pandemic's effects), so many of these arms-buying Americans have swiped their cards or put cash on the counter at gun-selling institutions with malice intent: to kill other people, without the motivation of self-defense. These dangerous individuals, buying glocks to military assault rifles, have been overlooked because of the lack of requirement for universal background checks in the majority of places - 37 states.

The effects of this increase in gun purchases have been seen and are continuing to become more visible. Since March, 2020, the prevalence of gun violence and mass shootings in the United States has been incomparable to the stats of years past. A record high in the past two decades, 2020 claimed over 20,000 lives (not including suicides) due to gun violence. A bulk of these horrible deaths came from the 610 mass shootings (defined as shootings causing over four casualties) that occured in 20 of 20 - an all time high. Additionally, the 50 largest cities in the United States experienced at least a 40% rise in gun violence.

However, this trend has not stopped; it has cascaded into 2021 with 232 mass shootings so far, as of May 26th, and almost 9,000 deaths. This tallies up to a mass shooting and at least 50 non-suicide-related gun deaths occuring everyday.

The flag on Wooster's campus has been lowered on multiple occasions last and this year to commemorate the losses in mass shootings like in Boulder, Indianapolis, and Atlanta.

President Joe Biden can only do so much to tackle the difficult task of shrinking the ubiquity of gun violence and mass shootings in the United States; but within his limits, he has accomplished a lot to reach this goal. In April, President Joe Biden announced four major actions to "address the gun violence public health epidemic": the Justice Department must issue rules stopping the proliferation of "ghost guns," must publish "red-flag" legislation for all states, must issue an annual report on firearm trafficking, and the Biden administration will invest in "evidence-based community violence interventions."

The rest of the work to end the public health emergency known as unparalleled gun violence in the United States is up to federal and state congresses. Common sense gun violence prevention laws and legislation such as banning assault weapons (which has been proven over and over again in other nations to reduce gun violence), implementing universal background checks, and increasing funding for mental health resources must be put into effect now; the ignorance and disgraceful actions of anti-common sense gun legislation politicians repeatedly blocking laws that will prevent gun violence and protect the people, which is their job, must end now.

Our founding fathers designed the United States Government in a way to foster healthy change. Our government can and must do just that in regards to significantly decreasing the commonness of gun violence; we are tired of waiting.