December 13th, 2012. A tragedy occurred in Sandy Hook Elementary, a tragedy which would deprive us of the future leaders our nation needs and of the joy these individuals would bring. In the face of this, we must all do our best to prevent something like this from happening again. A lot of people feel like the solution is to limit access to guns, or to ban them altogether. I can understand where they're coming from, because it would be nice to just limit access to guns and have all our troubles vanish like a bubble of soap, but it will not work. My heart bleeds for the families of those who died; the solution, however, is not to limit our freedoms and let government take away our guns. Here's why:

First, power corrupts. If we allow the government to have the ability to take away our gun rights, they will start taking away more and more rights until we are effectively slaves. Animal Farm by George Orwell demonstrates this.

Second, without guns, what would happen? Let's imagine that a criminal, who had somehow not managed to get his hands on a gun, was about to start fire to a gas station that had people walking all around, and nobody wanted to stop him by physical contact. If you had a gun, you could shoot him from afar, and prevent this tragedy. Or if a criminal did get his hands on a gun, which would happen. When he's about to shoot you, what do you do? Running is futile. Being armed would protect you.

Third, gun control has been shown to lessen the safety of citizens. According to a 1993 survey of 4,977 households, over the previous five years at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for self-defense during a situation in which they said that someone of their household would have been killed if they did not have a gun. This excludes military and police. This is from "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun." by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz.
In 1976. a law was passed in Washington D.C. To prohibit handguns. After that, they experienced a huge spike in crimes committed with guns. They were up almost 73%, according to an average of all the years it was in effect. When that law was struck down, crime rates dropped.

Finally, guns are simply not the problem. The real problem is much deeper. There has been a loss of morality in the U.S., and those who hold to morals are called “old-fashioned”, “prudish”, and “stuffy”. Society does not realize the importance of a good moral groundwork in society. Without it, we are doomed to crime and, eventually, slavery. Although crime cannot be stopped, we can try to prevent it by “being the change in the world”, as Mohandas Gandhi once said. The change must take place within ourselves. We must care enough to change deeply.