Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. was sight of a mass shooting on Feb. 14, 2018,

     Since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people on Feb. 14, the gun control debate has been the center of conversation once again. Should gun laws remain the same? Or should they be more restrictive? These points of view have some very strong defenders behind them. Two people, Jamie York and Elaine Walsh, offered some insight as to why they feel the way they do.

     Jamie had a strong opinion that the gun laws we have now are fine the way they are. “I don’t think the laws need to be more strict. Guns are important for us to be able to have in case we need to defend ourselves and our families,” he said. He also added that people use guns to hunt for food. “You got people up here in Maine and other places like this who use their guns to hunt. Sometimes what people hunt for is all they have to eat for the winter. If you take away guns, people can’t do that, and they’ll go without food,” he said.

     Elaine thought differently from Jamie.  She thinks that we do need to have more laws controlling gun use. “There’s definitely something wrong when people are able to get their hands on semi-automatic and automatic weapons and they’re not in the military,” she said. “I don’t think we need to ban them completely, but I do think there should be stricter regulations against them. How are people getting these military-style weapons? We need to make it harder for people to get those.”

     Whether or not someone wants more gun control laws, there is one question that many of us are asking: Why do shootings like the one in Parkland, Fla., keep happening? Perhaps you are someone who believes as Jamie does, that the problem doesn’t have anything to do with the current laws we have on guns. Maybe you believe in the phrase we hear all the time, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Or maybe you are like Elaine and believe that gun laws do need to be more restrictive in order to help prevent more shootings from happening. Whatever the case may be, there’s one thing that we can all agree on. That is that these shootings are very sad and need to be stopped in some way or another.