SUPPORTING PERSPECTIVE

My supporting perspective is a story about a friend of mine. Recently a 17 year old girl, Michelle Miller of Rockville High school was murdered. She had a friend Adam Ardnt, 31 years old and was in the military. I believe that he had PTSD because he had many suicidal thoughts. She wanted to go into the army reserves after high school to become a psychotherapist to help people with struggles after a war. But unfortunately it was her caring that got her killed. At 9 o’clock at night she received a text containing suicidal thoughts of Adam, so she went over to his house to try and talk him out of it. He ended up killing her that Sunday night April 7^th 2013 then turning the gun on himself. She was a very popular girl in school and was a 3 year varsity lacrosse player with potential for college. When news got to the school everyone was upset and in disbelief. This is a case in which guns were not the cause of this incident; it’s the person in which they need to be evaluated. I think that is a big thing that when soldier get back from a war need to go through some sort of process and waiting period in order to obtain a gun because there are so many cases in which they kill themselves  or others because of psychological problems. I don’t believe the type of gun had anything to do with it, if it held 2 bullets or 50 it would not have mattered; he did what he wanted to do, like any criminal is going to do. If someone wants to shoot 30 people he will bring three, ten bullet magazines. Limiting things like this is not going to stop the number of people shot or the crimes being committed. People will obtain stolen guns and illegal guns. Now I am not saying that handguns are ok to own, I do think that the strictness of those should be raised. But when it comes to rifles and semi-auto’s, I don’t think that banning the AR-15, the number one best-selling gun of the nation is not going to change anything. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has findings of “60% of gun-related crimes were stolen handguns” (Zawitz 1995). The main highlights of this article were “Although most crime is not committed with guns, most gun crimes are committed with hand guns”(Zawitz 1995). Another main point was “Surveys taken by inmates show that they prefer concealable, large caliber guns and that more juveniles have guns than adults”(Zawitz 1995). This means that the guns laws for handguns need to be improved to the point where it’s next to impossible for a juvenile to get their hands on a handgun. With this kind of change, there would be a huge change is gun related crimes.