Dear President of 2016,

Hey Mr/ Mrs. President, I want to first congratulate you on winning the election. I want to send out a letter to you on a problems that this world is dealing with. Just imagine your daughter or son is playing in front yard and all of sudden you heard gunshots go off, you run outside and you saw them laying on the ground bleeding profusely because they were in a middle of a crossfire.

We have to stop the guns, we have to stop people from killing each other. Did you know that in the year of 2006 more than 14,500 people had been shot in Philadelphia, one shooting every six hours, SIX HOURS. In the year 2013 more than 1,500 children from the age 0 to 18 years old had died because of guns and injuring 9,718 childrens. I asked myself how do people get hold of firearms? People get hold of these firearms because of “straw purchases.” What straw purchases is, is when someone isn’t allowed to purchase any “goods,” which in this case guns. So what that person does is they get someone who is allowed to purchase the gun and after getting hold of that firearm he/ she gives it to the person who wanted it. Another way they get hold of firearms is because of sales. Once they get those guns, they start selling it on the streets (gun traffickers). There are many other ways people can get hold of firearms, but those were the two big and common ways they can get it.

In 2016 Philadelphia homicide rate has been down, which is a good thing. But there were still 39 homicide victims from this year compared to last year where there was 41 homicide victims. Yes that an improvement, but why can’t there be 0 homicide victims? It because no one is watching what’s going on and how all these guns are getting put into the wrong hands. It doesn’t mean the homicide rate can start rising because it still can. Just a couple months ago, there was a gunman in Philadelphia who went on a rampage and started shooting at random people. For example, he shot up a tavern and a car before getting shot by police officers killing him on the spot. He struck a 25 year old woman killing her giving her 7 shots in the torso and wounding 3 other people. Everything connects back to guns, most homicides are caused by firearms. There were about 700+ firearm deaths from 2003-2010 ageing from 20-24 years old. As I got deeper into my research, I noticed that about 6.5 percent of youth carried a firearm at least 1 day in the last month. What I think should happen to prevent anymore homicides by guns is probably not have gun sales as often because that’s one of the reason on how people get a hold of firearms. They need to show proof that they are legal to carry a firearm, but I also feel like they should do a background check on that person. So if they ended up have warrants and stuff like that, they shouldn’t be able to purchase a firearm. By looking through all these stats I can conclude that Philadelphia homicide rate is really high, but there’s way on stopping the homicide rate from going up and that is to do what I said earlier, which is have the person to have license to be able to carry a firearm and checking their background history. 

Thank you for taking your time to read my piece Mr/ Mrs. President!