As of Nov. 1, 2019, the United States has suffered from 351 mass shootings with roughly 400 people killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

For the uninitiated, a mass shooting is defined by the FBI as four or more individuals shot in an incident. These numbers may seem staggering and the media does play into building up the hysteria around mass shootings, but I want to give context here.

More importantly, I want to address why Americans should and shouldn’t have the rights and their guns taken away from them. This is why the Second Amendment is the most-important amendment.

The media makes it seem that these mass shootings are occurring nearly daily. To their credit, this is true. In fact, we already have more mass shootings than days in the year, and the year isn’t even over yet.

Mass shootings make up a small percent of gun violence in the US. Just this year, there has been a total of 32,657 gun deaths. If we take out suicide, this number drops to 12,527. So three percent of these twelve thousand deaths are due to mass shootings.

These numbers may seem large, but to put them in perspective, I will give you statistics of other causes of death: More than 32,000 Americans will die in motor vehicle accidents, more than 80,000 will die from diabetes and more than 640,000 will die from heart disease (gun-violence.org, cdc.gov).

When excluding suicide, an American’s likelihood of being killed when compared to other causes of death is low. Some of you may be thinking, “why do we not get rid of guns, or at the very least restrict them to minimize these deaths?”

Well to begin, we have the Second Amendment that protects the right to keep and bear arms, so we cannot ban all guns.

So what about restrictions on guns like assault rifles? Assault rifles are fully automatic rifles that are already heavily-regulated and are restricted to military and police use.

Semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 have restrictions that vary from state to state, but semi-automatic rifles and rifles of any other kind account for less than five percent of criminal firearm deaths.

You now may be curious about what types of weapons are being used in gun violence. The answer is handguns.

Handguns account for a majority of shootings, anywhere between 55 percent to 65 percent of them according to Statista. These are the weapons that are causing most of these deaths in the majority of mass shootings that the media does not speak about.

The media tends to focus on the shootings that have high body counts or weapons that they are pushing to restrict. They push that there have been over 350 mass shootings, but do not tell you that there have only been 27 mass murders ( the FBI defines mass murder as four or more killed in a short period of time) (Gun Violence Archive).

More important than all of these other statistics, the media does not report arguably the most-important gun-related statistic: defensive gun uses (DGU).

DGU is the use or display of a firearm for self-defense of oneself, others or property. DGU is a statistic that can be difficult to measure, but  low estimates suggest that there are between 50,000 to 80,000 defensive uses of guns per year according to the National Institute of Justice.

At the higher end, 4.5 million defenses are estimated to occur per year. That is more lives saved by firearms than taken.

Guns protect people and their property. The right to fi rearms is necessary for the people of the United States to ensure self-preservation.

The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights in order to protect the natural rights of every person in the United States.

The Second Amendment is the most-important one of all, written so the American people could ensure a free state. The founding fathers knew that any government could become tyrannical, including the one they designed.

The people need to have the right to have weapons in order to keep the government from violating or taking away rights from its citizens. Without the Second Amendment we can lose our rights and lose our freedoms.