Gun Control Essay

Gun Control Policy “Four out of every 10 Americans own a gun. And nearly 3 out of 4 believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to have a firearm.” (Schwartz 41). The second amendment in the Bill of Rights states that as a citizen of America we are entitled to “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”(law.cornell.edu). So, should people today have the right to protect themselves with bear arms or should they not be allowed to protect themselves and give up guns completely? The people that argue in favor of guns state that not everyone is misusing it. Many are using guns for their own personal protection or even in hunting for recreational purposes. On the contrary people not in favor or guns argue that guns are hazardous to human’s safety. They claim that banning weaponry all together will help decrease the possibility of violence due to guns. Is the gun policy a fair assessment of how to handle weapons or should new ideas and solutions be drawn up to help resolve the two-sided conflict? The gun control policy today, is causing more restrictions on guns in effort to reduce violence, but is shown to not always be successful in its execution. In an article The Atlantic online newspaper, author Jeffrey Goldberg stated that, “Guns are responsible for roughly 30,000 deaths a year in America; more than half of those deaths are suicides. In 2010, 606 people, 62 of them children younger than 15, died in accidental shootings” (Goldberg 1). Although guns are shown to be responsible for 30,000 deaths not all are caused by pure acts of intentional violence. In Goldberg’s statistics it was shown that more than half of the 30,000 deaths were due to suicide and accidental deaths. The people committing suicide are not in a mentally stable mindset to make correct decisions and the death of children under 15 are due to accidentally acquiring a loaded gun and resulting in a tragic outcome. Author Emma Schwartz of In Congress, the Uphill Battle for Gun Control included in her article that in the state of Florida laws have been passed, “requiring owners to protect children by keeping their guns locked or unloaded reduced deaths among children” (Schwartz 41). If taking the actions of simply locking a gun up away from a child or unloading the ammo of a gun leads to a decrease of deaths among children then why must this not be a law passed in every state across the U.S! Innocent children of tragic firearm accidents could be saved! Schwartz also added a quote in her article from Vice President, Jim Sollo of the Virginia Center for Public Safety stating, “We have more than 250 million guns in this country, and not all of those guns are in the hands of rational people” (Schwartz 41). Jim Sollo is correct in that people that are mentally unstable should not have access to hand guns but, putting a restraint on guns will not stop violent people that are set out to kill. If a person wants access to a gun to kill another person they will find a way to get their hands on a gun despite government restrictions. By statistics shown previously, over half the deaths were by suicides and accidental deaths, not by acts of intentional violent crimes. If increased rates of death are caused by suicide and misplacement of firearms in a child’s hands rather than pure acts of violence, then the direction and attention of gun control should be focused on the awareness of safety. Another point Goldberg showed in his statistics is that in “the 1994 ban on sales of certain types of semiautomatic weapons, known as the assault-weapons ban, expired in 2004 and was not reauthorized” (Goldberg 1). If government banned sales on certain types of weapons in1994 why would they not reauthorize the ban in 2004 when it expired? Was it an illogical approach to control guns or did the government simply give up knowing the

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