The severe resistance federal gun control faces in America is misplaced, claimless and tragically strong. Congress should pursue a federal assault weapons ban.

As of April 16, there have been at least 162 mass shootings this year, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive which defines a mass shooting as any event where at least four victims are shot, fatally or not. Approximately 228 people have been killed, and 14 school shootings have occurred. 

The AR-15, perhaps the most infamous example of an assault weapon commonly used in mass shootings, is uniquely destructive. 

According to a research project published last month by the Washington Post, due to the speed, velocity and size of its bullets, a shot from an AR-15 causes far more severe damage to the human body than a typical handgun is capable of, making fatalities much more likely.

The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act was originally signed into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1994 and prohibited the possession or manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons with limited exceptions.  

Research studies have since determined that while the ban was enacted, fewer mass shootings occurred and fewer lives were lost to assault weapons. 

One such study, conducted by the New York University’s School of Medicine in 2019, specified that during the ban period, mass-shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur. 

When the ban expired in 2004, Congress chose against renewing the act, and assault weapons returned to our nation. Today, school shootings continue to increase, as displayed by the Washington Post’s heartbreakingly thick database. 

President Biden aims to return the assault weapons ban to the United States, providing preventative gun control for weapons such as the AR-15. 

Department chair and political science professor J. Mitchell Pickerill explains that it is difficult to put faith in a ban which will undoubtedly be met with severe backlash. 

“We just don’t live in a world where reasonable positions win,” Pickerill said. “You’re not inclined to meet a middle ground … From a gun rights advocate’s position, this is a first step, from the opposite side (the gun control side), that wants to do far more than just this.”

Pickerill echoes the unfortunate reality of our nation today, yet what bewilders today’s youngest generation – the students who’ve faced so many shootings that they are no longer a surprise – is why we must exist in it. Why must regulating something that has caused so much death be this hard? 

Jackie Matthews, a survivor of the Sandy Hooks shooting in 2012, was also present at the Michigan State University shooting in February. 

“The fact that this is the second mass shooting that I have lived through is just incomprehensible. My heart goes out to all the families and the friends of the victims of this Michigan State shooting,” Matthews said. “But we can no longer just provide love and prayers. It needs to be legislation, needs to be action. It’s not OK.”

The terror and numb acceptance today’s students have grown up with has left them scarred, but it doesn’t need to scar the next generation.

To gun rights activists, this is not about you. This ban is not an attack on you. It is not a conspiracy to take something away that you love or to trample on your freedoms. 

This is about children, the dreams they lost to guns, the nightmares that came to life and terrorized them while you turned a blind eye and ranted that even with a ban shooters would still find a way to get guns. 

The ban does not promise perfection. No regulation could ever stop violence against children permanently, but it will stop some shooters, and some progress is better than none. Preventing even one child’s death is incentive enough. 

Your insistence that their pain is about you is the reason we have gotten nowhere, the reason so many see gun control in our nation as implausible. Your misplaced resistance is why supporters of gun control are so painfully confused. We cannot understand why you are not crying with us or why each preventable death doesn’t crumble your world. 

Every day we fear for the lives of family members and friends working in or attending schools. We are terrified that someone will steal them, and they will make the headlines of America’s next commonplace tragedy. 

Face the statistics and don’t tell us these fears are unreasonable. 

Don’t pretend your arguments branch from anything beyond greed, and don’t pretend to be an advocate for freedom. There is nothing free about a death that we — you — could have prevented. 

You have been asked to choose between a child’s life and a personal possession, and yet repeatedly, you choose the gun over the child. This is what we don’t understand.