Doctor Albert Camp
English 1005
20 April 2016
The Bitter Truth about Stricter Gun Control The Gun Violence Archive counted 372 mass shootings which occurred in the United States just last year (“Mass Shootings – 2015”). Each mass shooting provokes the debate over the need for stricter gun regulations. A CNN/ORC poll discovers that 52% of American people believe that gun restrictions should be tightened, while 46% believe they should not (Diamond). Advocates of stricter gun laws insist that these laws can be the cure for the high level of gun violence in America, especially mass shootings and suicides. In contrast, other people claim that expanding gun control not only shows a minimal effect, but also it violates their …show more content…
David H. Chipman, Senior Vice President of Public Safety for ShotSpotter, calls for stricter gun control like prohibiting high-capacity magazines to reduce the threat of mass shootings (Follman and Aronsen). An article written by Frederic Lemieux, a criminologist, supports Chipman’s call. Lemieux announces that the numbers of mass shootings and mass shootings’ victims in the United States declined during the ten years of banning assault weapons and large capacity magazines (91). Furthermore, he suggests that the lower gun ownership rates a country has, the less likely this country is expected to have mass shooting incidents (82). He adds that banning high-capacity ammunition clips can minimize the number of victims (91). He reports that gun control laws in Canada and Australia reduce gun-related violence (90). This essay is useful because it shows data from foreign countries where gun control seems to function properly. However, Lemieux does not consider data from countries where gun ownership is high, while mass shootings are less common. This weakens his connection between gun ownership and mass …show more content…
Examining a nine- year- period of data from the fifty states, they determine that gun laws decreased male suicide rates between 1995 and 2004 (102). Nonetheless, they do not discuss how mental health and socio-economic conditions can cause and impact the suicides. Therefore, the correlation between accessibility of guns and suicide rates is