BY Abelino Ruiz
LifeAtStart.com Reporter

There are approximately 270,000,000 privately owned guns in the United States of America. That makes it the highest per capita number in the world. 22% of Americans own at least one firearm. America’s gun policies are reflective of our colonial history, the Revolutionary period, and frontier expansion. The Second Amendment states: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The Second Amendment clearly protects individual gun ownership. Right to bear arms is a tradition older than the country itself. Free gun ownership is just as important as free speech, freedom of the press, free religion, and various other freedoms enacted to protect the common citizen against powerful government.

Gun control laws do not deter crime; gun ownership deters crime. States with strict gun laws found that when guns were more restricted, crime rates skyrocketed. Criminals are less likely to attack someone if they suspect their victim may possess a firearm. There is a saying that goes like this: If guns are outlawed, only criminals will have guns.

Strict gun laws infringe upon the right to self-defense and make it difficult for people to defend their home and families. There is another saying that proclaims, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Dianne Feinstein, a gun control advocate, carried a concealed weapon because she feared for her life. Surprisingly, this just adds to the growing number of hypocritical politicians.

Gun laws that ban the purchase and ownership of “assault weapons” infringe upon the use of guns for sport and hunting. High-power rifles and shotguns are used for hunting and gun shooting tournaments. There were 13.7 million hunters aged 16 and older in 2011 and 32% of gun owners use firearms for hunting.

Criminals will not stop breaking laws. If guns are taken away from law abiding citizens, it will only make things easier for the criminals. Chicago is one of a handful of cities that have enacted strict laws on gun ownership. Gun shops, shooting ranges, assault weapons, and high capacity magazines are banned in Chicago. Between 2001 and 2012, 50,000 guns were seized in Chicago. They came from all 50 states and the majority of them were obtained outside of Illinois.

I truly believe that if the government were to enact strict gun laws on a federal level, chaos would ensue and crime would be through the roof. The only reason many European countries are able to restrict any sort of firearms possession except in the case of law enforcement and other protection agencies is because these laws have been in place since the invention of guns. America has always allowed citizens to possess firearms. They are everywhere. We can construct the laws, but we can’t demolish the guns.

BY Rayne Wilcox
LifeAtStart.com Reporter

On Monday, December 7th, 2009, I woke up for school like any other child, but this day was
different. Instead of waking up to my mom pulling the blankets off of me, I woke up to her screaming on the phone. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.

After my mom got off the phone, she asked my brother Dakota to stay home with me while her and my step dad went to Fostoria.

After my parents left the house, Dakota told me to go back to bed, and he’ll wake me up if he hears anything. I couldn’t sleep knowing something was wrong.

Around two in the afternoon, my aunt Lori picked us up to take us to my older brother Jordan’s house. I remember it being quiet on the way there. When we got there, we went into the house and I saw my aunt Angel and my grandparents. They looked distraught. Dakota and I went over and sat next to our mom on the couch.

All I remember from that moment, is my mom telling us that my brother, Jordan, was gone. I soon learned that he had committed suicide. I felt like my world came crumbling down. Jordan would never do something like this, it wasn’t in his nature.

The reason I am telling you this personal story of mine, is because recently we had one of our own take his life. A suicide doesn’t just affect the family and friends, it affects everyone around you, whether you knew the person or not.

I didn’t know Conner McCauley, but I was affected by it. I know what his friends and family are going through. I also know that the second year will be harder than the first year of him being gone,because the realization of him not coming back sets in. But if we join together to help spread awareness, maybe we can make a difference and help minimize the casualties of teenagers.

If you, or someone you know are in a crisis, I urge you to reach out for help.
Please call the lifeline, it is available 24 hours, seven days a week.
1-800-273-TALK (8255)

By Austin Hill
LifeAtStart.com Reporter

It all began last May when one day I received some random postcard from some random college. I received a fair amount of assorted junk mail from universities nationwide, presumably from all the various sites I signed up for, neglecting to read the terms. Instead of glancing over the mail and tossing it in the recycle like usual, I opened up this card, sent from Illinois Wesleyan University, and saw that I had been entitled to a free T-shirt, and all that was required of me was to go to their site and enter the promotional code given to me.

Skeptical yet intrigued, I went on to the site, entered the code, followed by my T-shirt size and mailing address, and bam, it was shipped. The task seemed just too extraordinarily simple and aberrant, and as the aphorism states “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” However the screen said that the shirt was on it’s way, so I thought, if they really sent out shirts this carelessly, then are there other colleges that do this as well?

>>Read Part 2: The Cat’s Out of the Bag

And so I researched. Although I found no hits of colleges giving shirts for those  mundanely entering a code, there was another means of getting sent free shirts that had been discovered. I pondered upon an article that describes the actions one person took that resulted in nearly a thousand shirts. His genius scheme consisted no more of sending every college in the U.S. emails requesting a shirt; And it worked. However the article presented one problem: it took place over ten years ago. With that in mind, I continued scouring the web, only to find a recent story of a school teacher who gathered a much more modest number of shirts (about 20) for her high school’s college fair. Now assured that colleges are still willing to send contributions, I started crafting my inquiry.

I really didn’t know what to say or what to include, but I knew I had to obscure the request somehow, giving them a reason to send me a shirt other than I just want free stuff. I considered  how it might be advantageous to them, and decided on the premise that I was a prospective college student interested in their institution, and I yearned for a shirt to promote their name and school pride. It seemed foolproof; It was a win-win situation after all.

Of course it’s never that easy, or else everybody would be doing it. I started sending out emails that night by replying to all the colleges that spam my inbox, but with little success. I woke up in the morning to about a half dozen rejections, accompanied with links to their school bookstore to buy it for myself. I realized that I had run out of colleges to reply to, and I still was not promised a single shirt. I retreated back to the internet to find that a majority (and with my experience about 70-80%) of colleges’ emails composed of: admissions@ the url of their official website. And so it really began.

I planned to go through the colleges by region, going from the east to west coast, state by state. Naturally I started with Ohio. I’d say I sent around 50 emails that second day, and was met with staggering defeat. Maybe one school said that they would send a shirt, and about 20 started with the word “unfortunately.” With the sluggish rate at which I could crank out emails it took about two hours to achieve an inane rate of success that was minuscule compared to the approximate 25% of t-shirt guy. Some colleges informed me that there were numerous requests for shirts, too many for them to honor. So it was apparent that many others were taking the same journey as me, and whether they were able to obtain any results I don’t know, but I only saw it as competition rather than a hindrance.

My immediate failure led me to the awareness that I would have to separate myself from the rest of these con artists if I were to have any prosperity of my own. I would have to compel that person behind the computer screen to take time out of their day and resources from their school because they absolutely had to send this kid a shirt. But of course, this person could be anybody, and to appeal everyone would be impossible. I had to give them some sort of compensation, or perhaps extra incentive that no one else asking for free shirts is offering. And then I had possibly the greatest idea of my life.

Contact Austin at [email protected]