Gun Control Essay

Kevin Herrera
March 12, 2014
Should Guns be banned in the United States? Throughout the years, guns have been responsible for many deaths in the United States. Guns have killed children, mothers, students, artists, presidents and many innocent people who tragically died by a gadget supposedly designed to protect society. Guns should definitely be banned from our society as an attempt to build a new country where people do not live with fear and where children do not witness violence in our communities. Every day we can find violence in the news, shootings, murders and more tragic events along the country that make us think tomorrow something similar might happen near us and we cannot do anything but to hope for the best. When we know that buying firearms is as easy as buying something from the grocery store, we can no longer live peacefully in society because nothing can protect us from a society that allows people to carry death on their hands.

One of the main reasons why people buy firearms is to protect their love ones, but this idea is quite contradictory because by having a gun at home any family member can have access to it, even children and teenagers who might end up causing a tragedy since they are not aware of how harmful weapons can be. We can take for example the death of Mason Hanaway, a 13-year-old boy who died on April 8, 2013 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Mason, a child of divorce parents, split his time between his mother who kept her gun locked on a safe, and his father who rarely locked his guns. He used one of his father’s unsecured guns to shoot himself. “I don’t know if it was something that was impulsive. I don’t know if it was something he had debated on, but I think because it was there, it was just maybe easier for him,” his mother, Katrina Burgess told the news. By having guns at home, people risk their own lives and the lives of those around them. When a person wants to protect his or her family by possessing firearms, that person is somehow promoting the use of guns among his or her family members which is not something a person should be proud of since a gun can be used for many different purposes, most of them causing tragedies in society.

In 1976, the Washington, D.C. City Council passed a law prohibiting residents from possessing handguns and requiring that all firearms in private homes be kept unloaded and temporally inoperable or disassembled. The law became operative on Sept. 24, 1976, but was struck down on June 26, 2008 and considered unconstitutional. During this period of time, the rigorous laws decreased the sale of guns, but increased the crime rates in Washington, DC. According to the FBI “Crime in the United States”, Uniform Crime Reports, this occurred mainly because criminals from states with less gun control, moved to Washington, DC where they robbed helpless unarmed citizens. This problem caused people in Washington, DC to struck down the gun control law and opened a discussion on whether gun control is needed to reduce crime rates or not. Washington, DC gun control law did not reduced crime rates because this law only applied for this particular place which tells us that the gun issue needs to be solved as a single problem on the entire country, and not be treated individually as a concern on each state.
People always have the right to defend themselves, but when a person kills someone in self-defense, the situation gets more complicated. The use of guns in self-defense usually complicates police investigation which can determine whether if a situation can be considered a crime or a self-defense act. We can take for example the Trayvon Martin case which

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