Killing Their Innocence

More than 30,000 people are killed by firearms each year in the US. Most of which are caused by handguns. Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15-24 year-olds. Most reasons for gun violence are caused by video game influence, and issues of mental illnesses. Video games are one of the biggest causes of gun violence because of the majority of in game violence that occurs. Today’s children are more prone to violence due to video games and the violent movies, but then that leads back to the way they were raised. In today’s world, both parents work, there is no family time to teach their children the main differences between right and wrong. When most people don’t know who they are harming, it makes it a lot easier for them to cause harm.

Using persuasive writing, Wright begins to influence his audience that game play is a beneficial source of entertainment not a wasteful one. Playing video games increases creatively, self esteem and improve problem solving skills of the players. Video games are becoming test runs that appear or feel close to the real thing. Where you can control everything with added effects like magic or future technology. Games have the potential to exceed almost all other forms of entertainment media. They tell stories, play music, challenge us, allow us to instantly communicate and interact with others. Encourage us to create things, connect us to new communities, and let us play with people across the world. Unlike most other forms of media, games are inherently tangible. According to Wright young children spend their days in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make believe into the real world that they are just beginning to explore and understand. Wright states that games are the result of imagination and that they consist of rules and goals. Generation of teenagers has grown up with different set of games. Teenagers use the scientific method rather than reading the manual first. Games today maybe a person’s only place to express a high-level of creativity and growth. Older generations have a lot of criticisms for games, the games can help a person learn to think on his or her own.

Many people in America are coming to the realization that gun violence is beginning to have a dramatic affect on teenagers. Christine Watkins, the author of, “Gun Crimes Cause Serious Harm to Children” Gives much evidence on why she believes more gun control, or even removing all firearms from homes will be the solution to this crisis. She tells readers that teenagers from urban areas have the greatest risk of being involved in some kind of gun crime. With her estimate of over 280 million gun in America, she believes firearms are too readily available and teenagers are accessing them with little to no trouble, legally, or illegally. Furthermore, she believes this is why teenagers suffer the most from firearm violence (Gun Crimes). Some

Innovations in computer systems and social media have increased the population of the audience. For example, “[the iPhone is] about 25 percent faster than the iPhone 7 and 80 percent faster than the iPhone 6S” (Manjoo). The improvements in the iPhone 8 compared to the others is significant and handheld devices are becoming more accessible. From phones in the wall’s to only having home phones, the iPhone 8 is a huge improvement in convenience. Adding on, the development in games on the phone and the computer provides entertainment for the general public. One of the more popular games is League of Legends, has “67 million active monthly players around the world and in August alone this crowd spent 122 million dollars” (Segal). The popularity of the games illustrates the effectiveness of gaming on people. Instead of children going out to parks and adults going out to socialize, they would rather much play video games at home. This describes the various types of technological innovations affecting daily lives.

On the morning of 24 October 2014, 15-year-old Jayden Fryberg calmly walked into the Marysville-Pilchuck High School cafeteria where his cousins were sitting, pulled out a Beretta .40 caliber handgun, and opened fire on Zoe Galasso, Andrew Fryberg, Nate Hatch, Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, and Gia Soriano before killing himself (Washington Post, Oct 2014). The gun that was used was similar to the one that his father had given him for his birthday a short time before. This event could have been prevented if there was a law in place that said that teenagers should not be allowed to own firearms. They should be focusing on other things, such as college and extracurricular activities instead of directing so much energy on shooting guns.

In the past five years, there have been a plethora of gun violence incidents that have taken the life or innocents children and teens here in Miami. For example, in the article by Audra D.S Burch and Rabin Charles “Jada Page, 8, dies two days after she was struck by bullet in drive-by shooting” Jada Page was an 8-year-old student at Sea Castle Elementary who was shot in the head while standing outside of her home with her father James Page while they were on their way to the movies with her father on a Sunday afternoon and was, later on, declared brain dead at Jackson Memorial. Jada’s father James page was shot multiple times in his torso and was hospitalized in critical condition. Officials, later on, found out that James Page was actually the target of this shooting. Jada’s story and death is an example of innocent children getting involved in a tragic accident involving gun violence and dying.

One of the most tragic things that can happen is nothing more than an accident. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 369 accidental shootings in 2016 as of February 25th Responsible gun owners who are unable to afford a gun safe due to poor economic conditions - or simply parents who made an honest mistake and left the safe open one time - can suffer dramatic consequences as a result. These incidents can be simple shots to the foot, but some can be much more tragic. According to the Washington Post, as of October of 2015, there have been “at least 43 instances this year of somebody being shot by a toddler 3 or younger. In 31 of those 43 cases, a toddler found a gun and shot himself or herself”. It is an unfortunate irony that a device intended to protect the ones that we love and to provide for their wellbeing can serve as their harbinger of death. Imagine a world where Trigger-Smart gun technology was the status quo. One has to wonder whether or not those 31 toddlers would still be alive because they would be unable to bypass the biometric security of the gun in question. It’s like putting your child in a car alone with nothing more than a button stopping it from rolling down the hill. That would be irresponsible parenting, it’s easy for children to push buttons, it’s their curious and experimental nature. The same is true of guns, and the universal ease with which they

Every year more than 20,000 children, as well as a youth under the age of 20 years, face deaths and in other case injured by firearms in the US. The fact that guns are lethal, as well as the fact that there is ease of access to the guns by the young people, is the main explanation why firearms are the second cause of deaths among young people between 10 and 19 years. Most of these deaths are homicides while suicides account for approximately one-third of the deaths by gun among the young people, and unintentional shootings account for approximately 7% of the deaths. Among the homicides that have perpetrated by the young people in their school include the 2012-gun attack at Sandy Elementary where 28 people at the school killed. In the year 1927 in the bath school, there were 45 murders whereby the majority of the victims were children. At Virginia Tech, a gunman killed 33 victims in the year 2007 (Swanson, et al. 361-376).

Shaquille Kornegay, 2 years old, had been napping with her father when she discovered the 9-millimeter handgun he often kept under his pillow in his Kansas City home. It was equipped with a laser sight that lit up like the red lights on her cousins’ sneakers. The sound of a gunshot, panicked, desperate cries, and then… silence. Shaquille now lies buried in a pink coffin, her favorite doll by her side and a tiara strategically placed to hide the self-inflicted gunshot wound to her forehead. The truth is, Shaquille should have never found the handgun under her father’s pillow; it shouldn’t have been there to begin with. Children like Shaquille suffer the consequences of poor gun control laws, because of weapons of mass killings that are so readily found when they shouldn’t be. It is a moral outrage that so many children are being exposed to such a weapon at very early ages, and that when incidents such as Shaquille’s occur, America’s leaders offer condolences and tears, but do little to nothing to ensure that children like Shaquille have a future; one that is safe and secure. There is little wonder why, in a country with more than 30,000 annual gun deaths, the smallest fingers on the trigger belong to children like Shaquille.

Us as a society are so baffled with a coming up with a solution to this issue, do we make it harder to obtain a firearm, do we make the tests longer and more complex to pass, or do we raise the age limit to own such a dangerous weapon? All these reasonable solutions but were looking past the real big picture here. We’re doing what we’ve always done in society and that's make irrational conclusions, “oh it's the deadly weapons that are able to gun down a crowd of people within a matter of seconds doing the killing.” That's where we fail as a society and that is why we need to open our eyes. We need change, let’s start replacing the horrible video games with handguns, let's make children understand how to use a gun at the age of 9, and finally let's get these video games banned. We need to use the popularity of the games and promote weapons, after all, it's the video games doing the actual

USA Today reported in April of 2013, “In 2010, 15,576 children and teenagers were injured by firearms – three times more than the number of U.S. soldiers injured in Afghanistan, according to the defense fund,” (Racioppi, 2013, Story, para 1). Racioppi alleges this number is a public health epidemic and a social issue across the U.S. The physical safety of children is the most observable and pervasive issue when dealing with gun violence. In a comparison study completed by Fingerhut and Christoffel (n.d., p. 28), data was gathered to compare adolescent death due to gun violence in the US to adolescent death in several other countries including Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Australia and England. The findings show that while the US had a rate over 20%, while all other countries compared in the study were less than 5% (Fingerhut & Christoffel, n.d., p. 28).

Hours earlier he was a happy 4 year old that loved the Hulk, Iron Man, and all of the Avengers. Now as Bryson Mees-Hernandez approached death with his brain swelling from a bullet hole in his face, his mother assured the boy it was ok to die. Bryson was playing under his grandma's bed and accidentally shot himself with a .22 caliber in the face. Many ways could've saved his life if Bryson’s grandma would have stored the gun in a safe where Bryson couldn't have got ahold of it and accidentally shot himself. About 200 million Americans own guns; about 59.6% more males use guns for suicide than females. The only way to stop that is to build a safe reliable gun room.

The source that inspired the idea for my project’s argument is the advertisement by the Kinder Egg Campaign, which is initiated by the Moms Demand Action used for pro-gun control. The main intention of the Moms Demand Action campaign is to argue over why Kinder Eggs have been banned in America when guns are not banned. They simply want to raise consciousness about guns causing more violence than intended rather than Kinder Eggs that were banned in 1983, which pose no harm at all. The image of the child in my project represents an ordinary child who has been left unsupervised by his parents. This shows that with certain laws which let some people hold guns in their house, a dangerous situation can occur which can cause the child to possess the weapon and use it as a

Everywhere you go teens seem to be glued to their phones, tablets, or computers. Technology is an addiction that does not seem to be going away any time soon. According to the Washington Post, teens can spend up to seven or more hours on their digital devices a day and the usage is still increasing. Not surprisingly enough, more than a third of all teenagers own a cellphone, ranging from a smart phone or just a plain old-school flip phone. But can spending all that time on their computers and smart devices be such a bad thing? Today’s easy access, always on world presents a wealth of opportunity for teens as students, but also challenges them to retain them essential humanity and unique personalities.

Many young children and teenagers have heard their mother’s incessant plead to get away from the screen and to go outside or pick up a book for once instead. The urge to play “just one more level” before starting that homework or doing those chores can be quite distracting. But are video games really as awful as Mom exclaims or as brutal as those TV ads depict? It turns out that video games can have a strong impact on participants’ lives in both positive as well as negative ways.