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Persuasive Essay Against Gun Control

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I am a gun advocate. I own guns. I shoot guns. My dad is a hunter. We have over 35 guns and 5,000 rounds of ammunition in a gun safe, in my house. None of these guns are assault weapons. None can fire hundreds of rounds in a matter of minutes. None were designed solely to kill people. However, millions of assault weapons have been manufactured and sold in the past ten years. An unknown number are now in the hands of fanatics who will use them to kill people for effect. The massacres in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs Church, Pulse Nightclub, and Sandy Hook Elementary School were all committed with lawfully protected assault rifles.The constitutional protection of the right to bear arms has inadvertently fostered an environment of perpetual danger that has become an accepted social normality. The second amendment reads, “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” (Sachs 1). Essentially, the second amendment protects the rights that US citizens have to buy, sell, own, and use weapons. The second amendment is certainly exercised, as Americans own more than 310 million firearms (Boyle 2). Now the question is, are fanatics that pervert the second amendment the reason we wake up to shootings merely everyday? An article written on November 6, 2017 says that there have been 377 mass shootings in 2017, and at the time we were only 309 days into the year (Hilbring 1). Although the definition of assault weapons is unclear, one thing about assault weapons is crystal clear--they were designed to do one thing, kill a lot of people in a short amount of time. Originally, assault weapons like the AR-15 and AK-47 were designed for military warfare (Dickson 52). From 1994 to 2004, a ban was placed on specific models of assault weapons such as AR-15’s and AK-47’s.In addition to banning specific assault weapons, the law set a limit of 10 bullets on high capacity magazines. During the years the ban was in act, the number of people killed in mass shootings decreased (Plumer 2). As said in a recent Commonweal article, the motives and circumstances of shootings had little in common (Normalizing Carnage 1). However, one

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