November 6, 2016

Dear Future President,

My name is Miles. I am 13 years old and I live in Chicago. I think that you, future president, should help reduce gun violence. In 2013, there were over 11,000 homicides by guns. There were also over 20,000 suicides by a gun. In Chicago this year 584 people were shot and killed, and 3,111 people were shot and injured. In 2013, the U.S. had almost 3 times as many gun deaths as other countries. I think this is embarrassing for our country and we need to do something about it.

One way we can make a change is enforcing that background checks are more strict. If we make the background checks more strict and harder to get through, people will be discouraged from buying a gun. Also, it will make people with mental health issues and prior crimes work much harder to get guns. That is just one way to reduce gun deaths.

Another way to reduce casualties is to make assault weapons inaccessible to civilians. An assault weapon is a gun that fires many bullets at once. This is dangerous because someone with an automatic weapon can do much more damage than someone with a single fire weapon. Mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School won't happen as often if we ban automatic weapons that can make it easy. If we ban automatic weapons, we can at least cut down on mass gun deaths if not stopping them all together.

If we stop gun deaths, we can make our country a better and safer place-. If you pass laws that prevent people from having guns that shouldn’t or banning assault weapons, it will help prevent deaths. I hope that you will take all these things into consideration after you have been elected.

Sincerely,

Miles Wandless