Dear Future President,

I am writing to you because I am concerned with gun control policy in our country. The controversy of gun control is a topic I can guarantee you are beyond familiar with. Every night, the news shows us a mourning family of an innocent girl who found herself at the wrong end of a gun, or a terrorist shattering the lives of thousands with a legally bought firearm. This is sure to urge several people to fight for some gun control legislation in our country. Yet proposal after proposal, year after year, and after plentiful amounts of proposals explaining possible reforms to the gun control policy, nothing changes. In fact, most proposed pieces of gun control legislation do not even make it to the house floor to see a voting. Why is that? Thousands of innocent people die each year due to mass shootings, but the legislation that could prevent the cause of these unjust deaths seem to be ignored. The United States government must be able to provide gun control policy to protect their citizens, and ensure they are considering the best interests of the American people when discussing this controversial issue. It is impossible to say that there is no room for compromise between the two sides of gun control.

As American citizens we depend on the government to do what is best for us. We put our trust in the hands of politicians to make decisions that they think will benefit us most as a society. However, the government as it stands has policies in place that puts a very large amount of the population at risk. There are little to no restrictions on the purchasing of a firearm in the United States. This means that any person, anywhere in America, could buy a gun at any given moment. Nobody can read minds, and we have no idea what the owner of a firearm is intending to do with the weapon. The gun may be said to be for protection, but do we really want to take the risk that it could be used maliciously? Is our world that scary? We should not have to live in a world where there is fear in simply walking to the end of our street on an Autumn morning because our neighbors possibly own a gun. Do we need these firearms that desperately? If we need these guns for protection because our country is that unprotected, we also need gun control policy to make sure those who would abuse the power of a gun, never get one.

Gun control legislation is brought up very frequently in congress, and there is constant gun violence and mass shootings directly corresponding with lack of regulations. But why do politicians who could reduce this violence, especially republicans, become repulsed by the idea of gun control legislation? We cannot reduce gun violence by sitting back and hoping for change to happen. The change must start with the people in charge. One of these changes can start with the ‘no-fly’ list and gun control. Why is it that people who are on the ‘no-fly list’ can still purchase a firearm? Isn’t the top priority of those in charge, and are able to pass legislation, to protect us? The people on the ‘no-fly’ list are suspected terrorists, and could pose a serious threat to the merican people. Someone who has potential to repeat a 9/11 scenario has the same access to dangerous guns as every other person in the United States. Our congress needs to advance our policies on gun control and assure that every American citizen has the most protection possible. The fact that over 200 United States citizens on the ‘no-fly’ list legally bought a gun this year is unacceptable. The current policy is obviously not working and it needs to evolve to assure that every citizen is safe.

Future President, how will you ensure that every citizen is protected? Will you sit back and let politicians hide under the title of congress and choose whether our safety matters, or will you be the change America needs? The safety of American citizens should be the top priority of congressmen, and there must be policy put in place that ensures the safety, and the best interest of the American people.

Respectfully, Tyler H.