To the Editor:

Every year, it’s the same story — violent shootings in various different places. School shootings, church shootings, everywhere there are shootings.

I always ask myself: Why do we still allow guns to be legal in our country? We are basically handing over the lives of innocent people to violent terrorists and heartless criminals. Why do we let this happen?

In the United States alone, 33,000 people are killed from gun violence each year. That’s a staggering amount of people.

Our country might not have the most people killed from guns each year, but our country is and should be a lot safer than other countries. Guns are the leading cause of death by homicide with a percentage of 66.6. Guns are the 12th leading cause of death.

If you heard that, wouldn’t you think we would have banned guns already? Nope. That's basically killing yourself and your fellow citizens.

Some people say that guns can be used in self-defense. So, what if the person attacking you has a gun? The National Rifle Association’s executive president, Wayne LaPierre, said, “The only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

I think that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to take away his gun by banning all guns. It's a much simpler way to stop that, and no people have to lose their lives

About 60 percent of deaths from guns are suicides. People might think that that is an argument against strict gun control laws because they weren’t killed by murderers but by themselves. But people in depression might commit mass murder and then themselves.

Suicides are also something to pay attention to. We should ban guns so people can’t commit suicide, and treat them.

In the whole world, our country has the most guns: 22.4 percent of adults own guns. That may not seem like much, but think about it.

If there are 100 adults in your neighborhood, it's very likely that about 22 of them own guns.

Moreover, they could be terrorists or criminals. In America,  about 300 million guns are possessed by civilians, and only 1 million by police. Those are huge margins.

In the United States, for every 100 people, there are 88.8 guns. There are almost as many guns as people! How insane is that? Everyone in the United States is vulnerable to gun violence, and everyone is in as much danger as everyone else.

Guns do more than take people’s lives. They cost our country lots of money each year that could be used to repay our national debt. According to various sources, gun violence costs our country $229 billion each year. You may ask, how does it cost our country $229 billion?

Every time gun violence occurs, many services are involved. These include medical treatment (someone asked a woman how much her gun wound hospital bill had costed, and it was around $5 million), legal fees (court, lawyers, etc.), prison costs (for long-term sentences), long-term medical and disability expenses (some people are critically injured and need health care for a very long time), emergency services (ambulances, which can cost $800 for a victim), police investigations (to figure out who caused the injury or death of a person), and more security in some places (if a place has low security that can influence more violence).

Why do we let all of this happen to our country? Tens of thousands of citizens dead each year, and hundreds of billions of dollars that we have to pay through taxes.

Guns only belong with policemen and the armed forces to help keep us safe. We should be able to trust them, and not criminals or inexperienced citizens who have guns and probably can’t defend themselves.

Andrew Yang

Farnsworth Middle School