Excelsior Springs, Mo. (Oct. 19, 2025) – As part of the Excelsior Citizen’s ongoing Letters to the Editor series, we’re sharing perspectives from community members on issues that matter to them. This week, Emersen Svoboda, a student at Excelsior Springs High School, writes about the rising toll of gun violence in America and poses a question that continues to haunt her generation: When will the guns be put down?
When Will the Guns Be Put Down?
An innocent woman named Shalanda Williams, age 43, was shot and killed at her town festival in Montgomery, Alabama, along with a dozen other teens and adults, leaving with severe injuries; this was later posted as a mass shooting. The definition of a mass shooting is an incident in which four or more people get shot (not including the shooter). Did you know by August of 2025 there were over 309 mass shootings in the United States resulting in 302 deaths and 1,354 people wounded? If you added the deaths with the injured and divided that number by how many days from January 1st to August 31st there would be an average of almost 7 deaths per day.
According to The Gun Violence Archive, there were 300 mass shootings in 2025 and by September 10th 47 of them were school shootings. According to k12ssdb.org, 1,039 of the school shootings over the past 59 years were considered an “escalation of dispute.” The meaning of “Escalation of dispute” is a fight or argument progressively getting worse or more aggressive over a short period of time.
While mass shootings are a big crisis in the United States another big problem is the use of guns for self harm. On publichealth.edu they stated that in 2023 49,000 people lost their lives due to suicide, and 27,300 of them were due to suicide with a gun. At the end of 2023 suicide was the second leading cause of death among humans 10-35 years old. Children and young adults die daily for little to no reason at all, parents leaving the house in the morning with their children for work and school and returning home with no child.
Why does being born your own way depict if you live or die? Amnesty.org says that people of color, boys and men in deprived communities, and other marginalized groups are more likely to be a victim of gun violence. Does having an opinion or being born a certain race or gender decide if you deserve to get shot or die? Black Americans die from gun violence more than 2.7 times the rate that white Americans die. Why should people have to die for humans to realize there is a problem? Why should children have to lose their parents to a gun fight to realize this problem needs resolved? According to HealthJornalism.org they said 25% of parental deaths are due to drugs and firearms. Children’s parents die because other people can’t be responsible with a gun.
Are guns the problems or are the people the problem? On the website statista.com under the section Crime and Law Enforcement, there is a graph showing that 85% of mass shootings were conducted with a legal firearm. This means they legally bought the firearm, and had to pass a background check before. And only 16% of mass shootings were conducted with illegal firearms. According to Rockinst.org, 74% of mass shootings were carried out with handguns. Handguns are the most used because they are easily able to be hidden or disposed of. 32% were used with rifles, and the other 16% were used with shotguns.
The average age of shooters in the United States is 34.5 years old. Around the age of 30 men’s hormones change by around 2%. Hormone changes can cause mental health to decompose causing mental illness. On website Columbiapsychiatry.org in paragraph 1 under header 2, they stated that, “Approximately 5% of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. And although a much larger number of mass shootings (about 25%) are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression, and an estimated 23% with substance use, in most cases these conditions are incidental.¨ Although 5% does not seem like a lot given the amount of shooting there has been so far in 2025, 5% is a decent amount. 5% of 300 is 15, this means at least 15 of the shootings so far in 2025 were caused by mental illness.
So when the question of “When will the guns be put down?” is asked, my answer is unsure. The decision should be held on the people and the values they believe in. However, remembering that people kill people, and guns don’t kill people helps me know that this problem needs fixed.
Emersen Svoboda
Excelsior Springs High School Student
Editor’s Note: This letter was submitted by a local high school student as part of The Excelsior Citizen’s community voices initiative. The views and statistics presented are those of the author. Our editorial team has reviewed the submission for clarity and readability but has not independently verified every data source.
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Thank you for printing this excellent letter. I am a member of a gun law reform group, and reading this well-informed, fact-based letter from high school student Emersen Svoboda gives me hope that young people coming up are going to insist on, and bring about, important, life-saving changes to our gun laws and gun culture.