In 2015 alone, there has been a total of 10,625 deaths by shootings in the US. Of those, 2,693 involved children being fatally shot or hospitalized. That number is disgusting. That is 2,693 sons, daughters, cousins and friends who were traumatized or killed by a simple machine. If we truly want to protect ourselves in the US, we need a complete gun seizure and production stop of all firearms.

After 9/11, President George Bush made an unthought and drastic decision to send our troops to Afghanistan to “seize weapons of mass destruction” without any evidence. This action was out of spite, and caused the US to spend more than 1.08 million troop years in Afghanistan. This vengeful act to stop terrorism was a mistake.

The white male with a firearm is the biggest terrorist threat to citizens of the US. We can’t ship out troops on ourselves in the US. This would be considered Martial Law. While the alternate solution is not simple, it is still necessary.

In the US alone, there are over 4.5 million firearms sold annually. While many simplify gun control into stricter laws according to mental health, the problem is still not solved. One of the biggest struggles in gun violence is the “strawman” purchasing method, where a liable firearm receiver buys a firearm and then ups the price and sells it on the black market. We need to cut gun violence off by the roots and stop production.

We spent a total of 1.646 trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This money needs to go to stopping the problems in our own country first. If we look to our sister country, England, they stopped selling handguns to citizens. Since then, their murder rate has decreased by 0.6%.

So why have we not already banned guns? Because we live in fear. We are fearful of someone with a firearm breaking into our houses and kidnapping our children, but where did the robbers get the guns? The same place we did. We have been trapped in an endless cycle of fear powered by propaganda and false statistics fead from lobbying powerhouses like the NRA. We need a presidential order to stop all production of firearms. There may be chaos in courts and households, but the long term effect is a more peaceful society.