Dear Future President,

My name is Paige, and I’m an eighteen year old senior from Salt Lake City, Utah.

I and many other Americans take issue with the current gun laws. There have been 290 mass shootings in 2016 alone, and a death toll of 12,555 in 2016, (as of writing this letter). Those statistics need to change immediately, and they need to decrease dramatically. What will you do to take action? How will you remedy this situation?

The last line of the poem “Revolver” by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author Carl Sandburg says it best: “And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the most revolvers.”

The Second Amendment is the protection of our right to defend ourselves, not a free pass to own a gun. Why not make the laws better, and make it harder to obtain a gun? Yes, law-abiding citizens should be able to own a gun, but if they're law-abiding citizens, they should have no problem with a background check. Gun-control laws would not make it so that criminals don't have guns, but they would make it much harder for just anyone to get ahold of.

I hope you feel the same as thousands of Americans do, and that you will do your part to make America safer for everybody.

Sincerely,

Paige