Gun Control Essay Research Paper The right

Gun Control Essay, Research Paper

The right to bear arms has been a part of this country’s constitution since its conception in 1776. Guns we originally a commodity that almost every household had. Firearms were used for hunting and protection. As the modern era came upon us, there became a lesser need to own a firearm because of a controlled police force and a surplus in food. The surplus in food and modern law enforcement, along with rising firearm crimes prompted the government to start reviewing gun laws. Furthermore, over the past century the right to bear a firearm has been restricted by many laws. These laws are instated to help prevent accidental and planned deaths attributed by firearms. The question still stands: can gun-safety laws help prevent accidental and non-accidental deaths caused by firearms. Is the second amendment out dated in today’s world, and is there a need for some a revised version of this amendment.

Gun control continues to inflame public opinion nearly a century after the first firearm law was proposed. Gun control supporters blame the high rate of violent crime and the large number of gun accidents and suicides on the easy availability of firearms and lax licensing and safety rules. Opponents have argued that access to firearms deters crime. Gun homicides are decreasing and fatal gun accidents are at a record low rate.

Many people view the gun control issue very differently. On one hand we have at home parents who are concerned with the safety of their children, from gun violence at school. They are also concerned with how easy it is for a minor to obtain a firearm. On the other hand, there is the NRA. The NRA believes that the problem is not with firearms. The problem lies with the people that misuse them.

The controversy with gun control that has developed over the past century has had many causes. Over the past century, since the first act of gun control policy was past in 1911 there has been an auterauge of gun control acts that have followed in its place. These acts have helped to insure the safety of the public from gun violence. Prior to the 20th century, no gun laws were instated for public protection and people were able to obtain a firearm without a license or permit. Today there are over 20,000 laws (Crimes and Criminal procedure, index) that are instated which limit the use of firearms to certain individuals that do not meet the proper criteria. Law makers are continuing to navigate to a fare ground where peoples civil rights are not striped from them and to a point were peoples are safe form acts of gun violence.

Even with these gun laws instated there is a continuing stream of gun related violence accruing everyday. Events like Columbine have triggered a chain of copycat school shootings around the country. School, which at one point were looked at as a place of sanguinary, have now been thorn full force into gun violence. Many politicians and people alike believe that we are not being hard enough criminals to deter people from committing these acts of gun violence. “These young guys today they’ll shoot a whole crowd in broad daylight just to get one dead” (Guns and violence, 30).

In the world today there is so much media violence shown on TV, movies, video games, and in the newspaper, it is hard to ex cape from the reality, which we have sounded ourselves by everyday. More and more kids are using violence to solve problems. It has become such an epidemic in our schools, that the government has sent out a booklet on what to look for in kids who commit these crimes. About 350,000 booklets have been sent out to all schools in this nation to tell parents, educators, other students who might be doing the kinds of things that have happened in Jonesboro and in Littleton.

There have been many advances in gun control over the years. Recently there has been the uses of gun safety locks that prevent anyone form using the gun by covering the trigger. Also the so-called smart gun, which does not fire unless the owner is in possession of the firearm by analyzing the gun owner’s handprint. This prevents the misfiring of the gun. These new perimeters help prevent accidents but neither gunlocks nor the specially made hand print guns are required when you own a gun. These new advances have helped public safety.

The gun control topic really began to surface in the begging of the 20th when outbreaks of crime and violence had spurred lawmakers periodically to try to control the use of firearms. Gun owners have appealed to an American tradition of using firearms for sport and for self-defense to block those laws, or at least weaken them. The effect of laws on crime is hotly debated, but there is no argument that has shown continuing growth of a vast private arsenal of weapons in the United States.

The modern era of gun control begins with the 1911 New York State law requiring a license to possess a pistol. The Sullivan law won approval from lawmakers as a way to stem urban crime. This law prevents people from carrying a firearm. This is the beginning of gun control.

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…

disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes… such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants;

they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides,

for an unarmed man may be attack