By Kate Weatherby

On April 9, a 16-year-old boy went to school in Pennsylvania and injured over 20 people. Unlike most recent school and public terror attacks, this boy did it using two knives. With only two knives, the boy, Alex Hribal, put a large number of people in the hospital, some in critical condition. This is an unusual way that Hribal did it, because most people that want to hurt others use guns, like in Newtown, CT, or bombs, like in Boston, MA.

This event was not only another tragedy in our country, but also has now put a new turn on the gun debate. Gun supporters are trying to use this event to show that guns are not the only thing that cause violence and deaths, and other groups that want guns banned now have to turn the argument to say that if Hribal had a gun, people would have been killed, not just injured.

The United States has had this problem over the past decades, and recent facts show that the U.S is near the top of the list with the most gun deaths per year. In 2007, 88 out of 100 Americans had a gun according to the Small Arms Survey, and over 60 percent of homicides involve a gun in the U.S. according to gunpolicy.org, so guns are common and dangerous in our country.

Guns are clearly a large issue in our society, and they definitely aren’t the core of violence, but banning guns will significantly decrease gun related deaths, injuries and crimes. Guns make people feel stronger and more powerful than they are, like in the Florida movie theater where a man was killed over a simple argument.

I think that guns can protect people, but overall, they do much more harm than good. Banning weapons will stop people from having the power to do crimes, but it will not completely eliminate them. What we really need to work on as a society is stopping violence, not just homicides but rape, assault, abuse and theft. Guns don’t motivate people to kill, but the widespread availability of guns makes them easy to obtain and cause harm.

Even if the problem is being a violent society and not just guns, we need to begin controlling guns. The world has a problem, an addiction to violence that we need to start fixing, and the first step is to ban guns.