By Alex Bean and Daniel Fordham
On October 1st, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire upon attendees of a country music festival on the Vegas strip from the Mandalay Bay hotel. 59 people were killed and over 500 were injured in the attack.
Junior Emma B. said, “It was a devastating event for America, and it’s really a wake-up call.” Junior Lucy P. said, “I just think it was a wake-up call to how bad things have been getting with guns in the past few years.”
“It’s really unfortunate because we see this more and more, and as a police officer, we now incorporate incidents like that into our training, so we train specifically to deal with that type of incident, and to me, that’s crazy,” School Resource Officer Jamali said. “When I was your age or younger, that wasn’t anything that I feel like we had to really think about. But now, officers are specifically trained for an active shooter type of incident with mass casualties.”
According to ABC News, there was a chance that, instead of hosting his massacre in Vegas, the shooter could have committed the same act in a place not too far away from Duxbury. Along with booking and visiting a hotel near Lollapalooza, a rock music festival, similar to the country music festival, Paddock also searched for hotels in Boston, near Fenway Park.
Upon hearing this, Senior Sam S. said, “I didn’t have that information, I didn’t know that. It definitely puts things in a perspective and makes you think that anything can happen anywhere at any time, and we just have to be aware of that.” Because of this incident, some students want to make a change.
Sophomore Abby C. is one of those students. Abby has made a petition to help limit the amount of ammunition someone in Massachusetts can buy. She said, “The intent is for it to go to Charlie Baker and that is going to limit the extent to which people can cause destruction because the people who are so pro-Second Amendment are so adamant about that right even though it is a little bit obsolete. By attacking ammunition, we’ve added a loophole to that problem.”
Massachusetts does have a lot of limitations on guns already set by gun control laws, which can all be viewed here. New York and California already have similar laws sent in place.
Abby C. said, “The point of order form is something that exists in New York and California and statistically, even though they have a lot of cities that have very high populations, they’re two very safe states, gun law wise. They have a lot more restrictions than we do. That’s saved a lot of lives, and they haven’t really had to deal with the issues of these red states who are pro-gun.”
The petition could gain some traction because the Vegas shooter had looked up hotels near Fenway Park, and how a tragedy on one coast could’ve been one on another. Abby C. said, “It stands as a beacon of something that is telling we have a problem that needs fixing.”
Click here to sign the petition.
Feature image from Vegas Twitter account.
The Dragon Flyer 