During the past few decades, gun control legislation is a rare entity. Usually killed in the Congress, gun control bills are either stifled by lobbyists or large grassroot organizations that pressure their representatives to vote down the bills. The Gun Control Act of 1968 imposed “stricter licensing and regulation on the firearms industry, established new categories of firearms offenses, and prohibited the sale of firearms and ammunition to felons and certain other prohibited persons.” Following the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was adopted in 1993 and “imposed an interim five-day waiting period for the purchase of a handgun until 1998, when federally licensed dealers would be required to use a federal…show more content… The nation is divided over the issue of gun control policy. Many Americans believe that it is their Second Amendment right to carry firearms while others argue that there needs to be regulations on guns to ensure that these weapons do not fall into the hands of young and dangerous people. Gun control legislation has been sparse throughout the history of the United States. The National Firearms Act of 1934 regulated the types of guns people could own while the Gun Control Act of 1968 outlined who could own guns. The groups prohibited by the federal government to own firearms were people who were a danger to themselves as well as others, those who were involuntarily hospitalized at a psychiatric facility, or those who lacked the mental capacity to manage their own affairs or who have plead not guilty on the basis of insanity of crime or incompetence to stand trial. Despite these regulations, records in December of 2006 cited that “mental defect” represented about 6.9% of active records in the NICS registry. By mid-2007, approximately twenty-three states contributed their mental health records to the database. In light of the states slowly giving records to the NICS, the number of people in NICS who are mentally
