Enhancing Gun Control Laws - A Discussion on Implementation and Tightening

The laws regarding gun control should be tightened and new laws should be implemented for the safety of our citizens and the image of our country. Recent events relating to mass shootings and terrorist attacks have brought this issue to the table, and there chance of it losing importance is nearly unforeseeable. A fraction of Americans may not understand why this topic is rising in importance. However, the prevalence of debate over gun control was brought to the public’s attention dating back to the 1920’s.

During that time, the Federal government was pushed to implement a feries of gun control policies by the waging wars of the gangs of the 1920’s. In 1934, the National Firearms Act was enacted with intent to prevent the spread of destructive firearms that had become increasingly destructive in gang violence. In more recent years passed, the “Gun Show Loophole” has been an issue in which there is a loophole in the laws for obtaining a gun at gun shows, as the name suggests.

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The law that creates the loophole states, “[a]ny person may sell a firearm to an unlicensed resident of the state where they reside, as long as they do not know or have reasonable cause to believe the person is prohibited from receiving or possessing firearms.”

This has given easy access to any person without the need to show background information or even a license, and is putting a gun in the hands of any person who has the money to buy one.

Many believe in the idea that more gun laws would infringe upon their right to bear arms granted by the Second Amendment. This is not true. The Second Amendment does not grant any person unlimited right to own firearms, as many who are less than fully educated on this topic believe it does. The right of any given person to carry a concealed firearm in public is, and never has been, protected by the Second Amendment. The exact wording of the Second Amendment is, “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.” There is an and in this statement, between “keep” and “bear,” and it was determined in court in 2008 that those rights are indeed separate. In 2008, the Supreme Court clarified that the right to keep a gun is a personal right, meaning the right to own a firearm and keep it in one’s home for any necessary means of self-defense. To bear the arms would mean the ability to present the firearm if necessary to defend yourself.

Considering the firearm should be only kept within your household, said firearm should not be “beared” outside of the home, as in public. The topic of self defense has been a go-to for many when defending their right to bear arms outside of their homes. However, based on many statistics, self-defense has rarely been the case for many assaults; even those that have taken place within the home where firearms are intended to be kept. Within the years between 2004 and 2011, 26,618,300 violent crimes were committed. Of this whopping number, only.79% of the victims protected themselves with a firearm or a threat of one. That is less than one percent, which is unbelievably low; it is too low to back the statement, “I need a firearm for self defense. An even larger amount of property crimes occurred (burglary, break-ins, etc.) at 84,495,500 crimes; of these, only .12% made an attempt to protect themselves with the threat or use of a firearm. Gun related deaths would be substantially reduced if gun control was tighter.

This is an obvious statement, basic cause-and-effect. There were 464,033 gun-related deaths between the years 2000 and 2013; only 2.2% of these deaths were unintentional. At 66% guns were the leading cause of death by homicide in 2015. A study by Lancet in March of 2016 found that firearm-related deaths could be reduced by a projected 57% if federal universal background checks were implemented. These same background checks for ammo could reduce these deaths by 80.7%, and gun identification requirements would deplete them by 82.5%. Many who oppose stricter gun control laws have similar concerns. A common statement is, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” However, if you take the firearm away from a man who has intentions to enter a school and initiate a mass shooting, how will he shoot those people? This statement is ignorant; it is similar to saying “methaphetamines do not kill people, people kill people,” yet if you were to take the fatal factor of the equation, there would be no ability of the person to kill.

This is why other fatal objects such as lethal drugs and destructive weapons such as bombs have been strictly illegalized; if they aren’t in the possession of a person, they can’t be used by that person to kill. (Will add more here in final draft!) Firearms should have tighter laws regarding who can obtain them and how easy it is to do so, as well as what kinds of firearms will be legal for an average citizen to have. Guns should not be made completely illegal, because that will result in only criminals obtaining them. However, background checks should absolutely be required to purchase a gun or it’s ammo/counterparts. Firearms that are semi-automatic, not used for hunting, etc., should not be permitted to be in circulation of the general public or sold to them by gun shops.