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Anti Gun Crime

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Introduction
When Eli Whitney first mass manufactured guns in the 1790’s, his first contract called for production of 10,000 weapons (Eli Whitney Museum n.d.), in 2013 more than 10.8 million guns were produced in America alone, an 1080% increase from Eli Whitney’s original contract for 10,000 weapons (ATF 2015). With huge increases in manufacturing comes and equally large jump in gun ownership, one would think; “31.0% of households reported having a firearm in 2014, essentially tying with 2010 for the lowest level of gun ownership in the last 40-some years. This is a decline of about 17 percentage points from the peak ownership years in 1977-1980.” (University of Chicago 2015). Over the years the rate of ownership has drastically decreased, but the rate of crime associated with illegal guns has gone up, in a study by Phil Cook, Susan Parker, and Harold Pollack (2015) found that, “70 inmates who had possessed a firearm, only 2, or 2.9 percent or 98.1%, had bought it at a gun store. The report found that percentage was in line …show more content…

Nationwide; it said that guns that are obtained through numerous types of illegal channels, “39.6% of got a gun from a friend or family member, 39.2% on the street or from an illegal source, 0.7% purchased a gun at a gun show, 1% purchased a gun at a flea market, 3.8% purchased a gun from a pawn shop, and 8.3% bought their guns from retail outlets” (Harlow 2002). Those numbers only represent people who were in jail for violent felonies and how they purchased guns once they got out of jail, but these numbers represent a strong subset of the population. Nationwide most guns that are used in crimes are obtained through those channels, “ATF officials say that only about 8% of the nation's 124,000 retail gun dealers sell the majority of handguns that are used in crimes.” (Noyes

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