Essay Example on Illegal Gun Holders Are a Danger to Society

Guns are meant to protect people in the event of any danger, and they should only be used for self-defense. However, going by the recent news items like the El Paso mass shootings that took place on the 3rd of August 2019 in the United States of America (Texas), which saw many people lose their lives and hundreds hospitalized, is a reason enough to declare guns illegal for all civilians. Mainstream media channels like BBC and others carried the story to show how rampant the shootouts were and how a lot of people got affected by this incident (BBC NEWS, 2019). This is not the first incident as we have read about mass shootouts that have taken place in many other countries. Based on this, we can link such issues to psychological problems or issues affecting people resulting in such responses. As much as the mainstream media channels undertake the role of informing people, we cannot ignore concerns about how they report such cases. The majority of these media stations does not report in ways to unravel the root causes but rather focus on drawing and attracting more viewership to their channels.

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According to Moore (2011), several theories have been seconded to help people understand the life of crime and delinquency. For instance, the El Paso mass shootout is linked to human behavior, which results in crime. If a person walks into a shopping store and sprays bullets at others, it is not only an issue of morals but also a concern about their psychological state of mind. Intelligence Theory- human beings have a large cerebral cortex that makes them very smart that the reason the Theory of intelligence (Ward, 2013). It is more of how human beings behave. He says that intelligent people tend to have a very high IQ and majority succeed in specialized fields like military, technology and so forth. This Theory creates a connection with the media story of the shooting. The young man seems to an intelligent mind that can be engaged for the betterment of society, but due to other underlying psychological issues, his mental state makes him resort to killing people (Ward, 2013). Thus the media only focuses on the incident and fails to give attention to the psychological trauma such as incidences cause. The second theory is Personality Theory, which involves the instincts, unconscious process, other childhood influence, and so forth. According to Moore (2011), the personality of someone depends on parental upbringing for the first five years of a child. This will either help a child to grow normally or not depending on the environment they get exposed to. For instance, we can conclude that the 21-year-old who shot people at El Paso in Texas has a personality issue affecting his thinking hence the reason for his reactions (Moore, 2011). The media should have dug into the suspect's life and tell people about his upbringing up and the kind of environment they grew up.

Americans over the years have found it hard to reach common ground on the issue of guns and mass shootings. As such, crimes continue to be perpetrated, a lot is written, media houses carry out this developing story for days, and later everyone forgets about them, and life goes on as usual. According to Ward (2013), Aristotle looked at psychology as a mental process that starts from perceiving believing reasoning striving and so forth. Based on the shooting that took place at the Texas shopping store, it is believed that a young man aged at least 21 years old was behind the shooting on what he termed as a revenge for the Hispanic invasion of Texas. We can link such incidences to a mental problem. Although the mainstream media reported on this story, none of the media houses gave this story an angle that it deserved in addressing issues of mental issues and psychological problems that exist in the society pushing people towards such reactions just to vent their anger out (Moore, 2011).

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the El Paso mass shooting is just one of the many mass killings to ever happen. Unfortunately, the mainstream media does not give such stories the news angles they deserve just to educate people on matters of mental health and other psychological issues in society. As much as the majority focuses on attracting more viewership to their websites, we cannot ignore the psychological impacts they cause. Theories like intelligence and personality theories help us in understanding the behavior of people and their upbringing that may lead to people reacting in certain ways.

References

BBC NEWS. (2019).Texas Walmart shooting: El Paso attack domestic terrorism. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49226573.

Moore, M. (2011). Psychological theories of crime and delinquency. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 21(3), 226-239.Ward, J. (2013). Psychological principles. Cambridge University Press.