Causes Of Gun Control In Different Countries

A shooting here; a shooting there; an every day occurrence heard in the newspapers and on the news channels on television. New media are reporting a shooting somewhere. Whether the shootings are accidental or intentional; they are happening across the United States. Nevertheless, in today’s society, gun violence is sparking debate and controversy on how to control gun violence. Throughout the country, thousands of laws and regulations have been created to aid in the control of guns. Through much study, the gun laws and regulations in place have very little effect on the number of gun related injuries and deaths. More needs to be done to establish an effective way to control gun violence.

With the popular culture providing positive images of guns, the United States has a gun prevalence that is very rare in the modern world. While many people appreciate the “gun culture”, guns are heavily involved in violence in the United States. According to U.S. Department of Justice, since 1960, more than 750,000 Americans have died under firearms, including homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries. The figure 1 provides a comprehensive survey of U.S. violent crimes for the period from 1993 to 2011.This figure illustrates that from 1993 to 2011, about 60% to 70% of homicides were associated with a firearm. Over the same period, between 6% and 9% of all nonfatal violence, with about 20% to 30% of robberies and 22% to 32% of aggravated assaults involving a firearm.

There are an abundance of causes and effects in the way guns are used, purchased, and sold – legally or illegally. A few causes include how guns are kept (with a safety and locked away or not), and in the way guns are obtained. The effects of these acts are, peoples state of mind, and the criticisms law enforcement may receive. Thought of as technical and firm, the laws about guns can easily be bypassed by criminals and people who are not in the right frame of mind.

One of the many misuses of firearms are the mass shootings that seems to becoming a normal tragedy in the United States schools. Mass shootings that occur usually have a motive or some kind of emotional tie to why these types of murderous actions took place. Phillip Cook and Kristin Goss explains emotional ties of the killers and what drives them to murder:

The issue of gun control begins with the careless distribution of firearms and how easy they are to obtain. In the United States, many mass killings by gunmen in civilian settings set

Many people around the United States are victims of shootings, whether they be school shootings, mass shootings, or Terrorist Attacks. There seem to be two common ideas either support or oppose gun control. In the United States, many gun control supporters believe that guns are the reason mass shootings happen while gun control opponents believe that people are the cause of mass shootings. But they both want the people in the United States to be safe, whether that is from government tyranny, mass shootings, gun violence, or mental health.

The United States is one of the few countries were the right to bear arms is protected by the constitution. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most violent with incidents involving guns this year reaching an estimated 36,212 and an approximate 9,050 deaths (“Gun Violence Archive”). There are an estimated 310 million firearms in households across American, these are only estimates because current gun laws do not require them to be registered or tracked. A more staggering estimate is that most of the guns owned by private citizens are semi-automatic guns, the same type of gun used in almost all mass shootings. While these privately owned guns are legally purchased, many times, they land in the hands of criminals, and owners never report them stolen. Mass shootings and gun crimes are not the only issues with gun violence the one never talked about is suicide, more guns available equals more suicides. The United States is one of the easiest countries to own a gun legally or illegally, stricter gun control laws are necessary.

The proposal to the problem focus on mass shootings specifically, not gun violence in general, although the potential solutions to mass shootings would do much to prevent gun violence as a whole. Mass shootings represent a mere 2% of gun-related deaths, yet the sheer horror, shock, and scale of carnage tend to capture the public’s attention so much more so than the typical shooting homicide or suicide, which are seemingly ubiquitous in news reports these days. The big issue with solving the problem of mass shootings is the variety of factors involved with the shooters’ motivations to kill.

Mass shootings in the U.S have many different causes as to why they occur. USA Today mentions that breakups, estrangements and family related problems make up the majority of mass killings. Although, many seem to blame gun violence and mental illnesses. Mass shootings can also involve a failed security system such as mistakes in the mental health system and gun control. (USA Today, 2013.) People question whether or not people with mental illness should be allowed to obtain a gun, while others argue that guns can provide safety when used correctly.

Guns have been is society for centuries. They have been used for hunting, war, and even safety. However, in the past several years they have begun to take the lives of many innocent victims, often young children. In response to the killings in Newtown, Conn., it has been noted, “If this were a country, the number of children killed by gun violence would violate international law.” (Browne-Marshall) F.B.I. data shows in 2011, 1,668 African American children were killed due to guns. Day by day gun violence is rising and it is not only in ghetto neighborhoods.

Researchers at the University of Alabama have conducted studies trying to find links between guns and mass shootings (Michaels). There are hundreds of millions of guns in circulation in America today. In fact, “the total number of guns in circulation is at least 240 million” (Ballaro and Finley). Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, suggests that “America’s high rate of public mass shootings is connected with the number of guns circulating in the country” (Michaels). Implementing stricter gun laws would cause fewer people to want to purchase guns, resulting in fewer guns in circulation in the coming years. In the United States, “around 30,000 people die from gun fire each year. Around half of these are murders, a little less than half are suicides, and the rest are lethal accidents” (Ballaro and Finley). (2) Currently there are several million guns in circulation, and gun deaths in America are higher than any other developed country. (5) If the trend continues, the number of gun deaths will continue to increase. As stated in the article “10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down.” author Dave Gilson states that “People with access to more guns tend to kill more people- with guns. States with higher gun ownership rates have higher gun murder rates- as much as 114% higher than states with lower gun ownership rates” (Gilson). (7) More

When a person hears the word "gun," he or she usually associates the purposes and uses of a gun with crime-related issues and plots of terrorism because of modern culture. They are used for that purpose by some people, but those people do not represent all aspects of the relationship of firearms to society. In the United States, many laws have been passed in order to regulate the use of guns by certain individuals, along with the establishment of associations that specialize in the usage and handling of firearms. With the regulation of firearms passed by the government, guns has become an integral part of modern society, attributing atrocities such as homicide with them, but also providing a portable means of protection. The addition

The Orlando nightclub shooting in Florida on June 12, 2016 was the single largest massacre in U.S history, taking the lives of 50 individuals, including the shooter himself, and injuring 53 others. This is one extreme example of the gun violence that has been occurring in this country, but mass shootings like this and the one at Newton in 2012 are only a small part of our gun violence issue. The everyday gun violence that takes place in cities all across the United States claims the lives of thousands every single year. According to The Guardian, 33,500 civilians die each year because of gun brutality- “that’s about 1 life every 15 minutes” (Beckett). Between the years of 1999 and 2013, there were 464,003 gun deaths in the U.S, about 58% of them were suicides 37% were homicides. (ProCon.org) Gun violence and the consequences of that violence, have become a real and dangerous problem in the U.S , why else would the CDC list the United States as having the highest rate of gun violence out of all developed countries today? (Gale Opposing Viewpoints) This issue is not just attributable to a single factor, there are several that play an important part in why gun violence is such an issue in the U.S, namely laws and poverty; and in these causes we can also find solutions.

Mass shootings are a huge epidemic in the United States right now. Many people live in fear of another mass shooting. Two important facts to know about mass shootings is what exactly a mass shooting is and how often they occur. CNN’s authors used the Gun Violence Archive to define a mass shooting in his article “A Visual Guide; Mass Shootings in America” as “any incident where four or more people are wounded or killed”(Willingham). The frequency of mass shootings depends on which source you look at; using the definition given by CNN as well statistics, the United States has seen “136 mass shootings in the first 164 days of this year”(Willingham). However, author Sam Harris has a staggeringly different statistic in his blog article “The Riddle of the Gun”. Harris claims that “seventy mass shootings have occurred in the U.S. since 1982, leaving 543 dead” (Harris). Harris’s article is three years older than CNN’s article, yet the facts are staggeringly different by an amount that is nearly impossible to reach in three years. The definitions the two articles used for defining mass shootings are obviously different, but are both capable of informing the reader on the statistics of mass shootings frequency.

It is impossible not to open a newspaper, watch the television, or listen to the radio with out hearing about some type of gun violence. Perhaps the main reason for such high gun violence is that guns are so plentiful in the Unites States. In fact, there are sixty five million handguns in America ("The `facts' about Guns"). These guns contribute to an annual medical cost of fourteen billion dollars, which is spent solely on treating gun victims ("Handguns in America"). Not surprisingly, handguns are the cause of eighty percent of homicides, seventy percent of suicides, and almost every accidental shooting ("Youth and Violence"). Handgun violence is a problem that is easy for everyone to see. How to solve this predicament is another