Every so often the media and news feeds flood with reports of a mass shooting. Families mourn. In the days that follow, calls to action can be heard, and there is a demand for change. Sometimes minor legislation passes, but in the United States extreme change is rarely seen. Other developed nations provide an opposite comparison. Following the Port Arthur shooting in Australia and the shooting in Great Britain, both countries organized for significant gun reform.
According to Nicholas Kristof’s article “our blind spot about guns” gun control is a lot like cars regulation such that if we can regulate cars we can regulate guns. It took a lot of time and effort but thanks to regulations cars are safer than they were many years ago, and the same is very possible with guns. We need to keep our country safe. The first steps to gun control are improving on background checks and also requiring trigger locks on all guns.
This country has a mental health issue. We don't want to talk about it because it makes us look vulnerable. There is no law that can fix this, you could literally go door to door and take every single firearm in this country and we would still see tragedies like this occurring. We have a shit ton of people in this country and people like to kill each other, it's just the way this works for some reason. The reality of it is this; these public shooters are more or less a statistical anomaly. They're comparatively rare in a country where people constantly use illegally-acquired firearms to commit murders every day.
From 1988 to 2001, the usage of anti-depressant drugs in the general public increased by four-hundred percent (Swanson). The mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary took place in December of 2012, and during 2014, firearms were used in 88 percent of teen homicides, and 41 percent of teen suicides (“Suicidal Teens”). On February 28th, 2017, the Trump administration repealed a firearms regulation that prevented mentally disabled persons from owning guns. At the same time, teenage mental illness is on the rise, specifically in cases of depression and anxiety. A report from the Surgeon General shows that over 90 percent of adolescents that committed either suicide or homicide have or had a mental disability. Mental disabilities such as depression and anxiety put teenagers at a high risk for homicides and suicides. Teenagers who are stressed due to school, lack of parenting, puberty, bullying, and other factors can develop depression, anxiety or another mental illness. Allowing these teens easy access to firearms proves time and time again to be very dangerous. In some cases, the families of these teens have never been assessed to see if they can responsibly store firearms. The only background check performed is on the owner of the firearm, meaning that a person may own the weapon even if another family member living with them legally cannot. Loose gun control laws allow families with physiologically ill children to have access to firearms, without first checking to see if the disabled children in the home are responsible enough to be around said firearms. Repealing gun control laws instated by the Obama administration will cause an increase in adolescent firearm-related homicides, suicides, and tragedies similar to the one at Sandy Hook Elementary.
On October 1st 2017, Steven Paddock shot and killed 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. Over the course of 12 minutes, Paddock committed the worst mass shooting in modern American history. We must honor the victims and respect their memory, but we have to ask ourselves what we will do to prevent this in the future. The first and completely valid response to that question is enacting stricter gun control, but there is much more than that. We can increase funding for mental health treatment, we can take stricter security measures at hotels and concerts, however there is something major that needs to be changed that hardly ever gets talked about. It’s something that we are used to, that we have seen all throughout our
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and leaving 17 injured at Virginia Tech. On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza went on a shooting spree in Newtown, Connecticut, killing his mother before shooting 20 1st graders and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary. On June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 58 others. Most recently on October 1, 2017, 58 people were killed and another 489 injured when Stephen Paddock fired onto the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest music festival. Many more mass shootings have happened where more innocent people have lost their lives. Gun control has been in debate for some period, some people advocate for it while others dissuade it. Now more than ever, changes must be made to better protect people from losing their lives to a shooter. To prevent future tragedies in the United States, there should be stricter gun laws enforcing a more advance psychological test, imposing a federal gun license, and have a 1 month waiting period to receive the gun.
Over the course of three years, approximately 160 school shootings have been recorded. Including fatal and nonfatal assaults, suicides, and unintentional shootings. In all, the incidents resulted in 59 deaths and 124 nonfatal gunshot injuries (Analysis of school shootings). It is unreasonable how many innocent lives have been taken away because of these tragedies. Oftentimes when a mass shooting occurs, people debate gun control laws more profoundly. Controlling the gun laws and the way guns are obtained may be a solution to help control school shootings and save many precious lives.
Gun control is one of the most talked about topics in modern day America. 43 of 50 states have the right to bear arms. Most states have to background check you in order for you to purchase or sell guns. Some other states prevent carrying guns and some other ban assault rifle weapons. People who support the gun laws say that the second amendment was meant for militias and that gun restrictions have always existed. People who oppose that say that guns are needed for self-defense from people who invade houses or are actual threats. Although both of those are correct, there will always be two sides for control laws.
October, 1st 2017 has marked the latest in a now all too familiar trend of tragedies; a mass killing of civilians by a sick individual. In the wake of this tragedy, there is a mass of human emotion, grief, anger, sadness, and a demand for justice to right what has been wronged. In looking for justice, one needs an antagonist to blame, in this case an object, the gun. While it is true that firearms are the weapon of choice for many violent tragedies across the United States, will a ban on firearms truly solve the problem of violence for the country? Although a firearm ban may seem like a preventative for violence in the United States, a comparison of violent crime in other countries with varying levels of gun control, the lack of
A common controversial topic that is discussed universally is the issue of shootings and gun use. Citizens views on the topic range from the wishes to completely ban guns, to the total allowance and ownership of such items. In comparison, some drugs may be illegal, although people still possess them. Would the same be for guns? Should more be done to implement the control over guns? Or should more freedom be given to gun owners? One can visualize the positives and negatives regarding gun control by learning more about the following: the suspected terrorists list, the black market, increase in gun crime, rarely using guns for self-defense and how extensive background checks would prohibit unqualified people from obtaining firearms.
In the wake of the shooting in Las Vegas this year, there have been more tension around gun-control than ever. This shooting has inspired a new wave of people to argue over whether or not the United States needs new gun laws, one side argues that we need more restrictions on the owning of guns, the other side that it's a citizen's right to own a gun and to take that away is unconstitutional. In this paper, I will first give a rundown of the history of laws concerning gun control, then I will talk about whether or not America should pass more gun laws then I will address how this relates to previous cases involving gun control.
Gun Control I believe are great laws that help the country rid themselves of violence by taking away fatal weapons that are used by those unsuitable to use respectively and defensively, but that is what the gun control laws are for. The gun control laws are to take away weapons from the ones who would use them not for self defense, but rather they would use it for reckless murder. To be honest the gun control laws are not 100% guarantee, because of the fact that you really don’t even know if those people the people who have a clean record with the cops. You never know they can change their mind and go crazy and go and do a murder, but it is better than just giving and selling guns to everyone in the United States and allowing anyone to buy and sell weapons. Being able to have people being able to have their weapons in their pockets is a controversial issue, their is a good and bad to it the good is it is great for self defense at critical moments the bad is that that person who has the weapon holstered may just be a person who is going to commit a massacre. You see nobody knows who will not or who will murder people it is hard to tell even if someone has a non criminal background it is still hard to tell. In fact when guns are allowed to be holstered the murder rate in the country rises as shown in Agresti, James D., Smith, Reid K. & Guerra, Rebecca. “Gun Control Facts.” Just Facts. 6 November 2017. Web. 8 November 2017. (-- removed HTML --) . When gun control laws are thrown to the curb they put many more lives at risk such as this website showing murders in states increase when weapons are holstered.
Can you imagine waking up at three in the morning to the sound of your front door being kicked in, and police swarming in to your home, on a mission to remove all your legally obtained firearms, while ripping your house apart? I can’t, but that is what it seems like NRA activists imagine happening at the mere mention of gun control. Those two words seem to ignite the same “fight or flight” reaction as the boogie man to all my fellow gun-toting Americans. However, I believe that there is a way to bring those for and against gun control to a common ground by improving background checks, restricting gun shows, and banning semi-automatic rifles.
From School shootings to Movie theaters and concerts, we the people of the United States have noticed tremendous amounts Massacres going on in our country. All of this violence raises many big questions and plenty of controversy in our country: Do we need a ban or some sort of control on guns? Many people like to argue that this violates their rights and the second amendment of the U.S. constitution telling us that the people have the right to bear arms. Many people like to argue that guns don’t kill people, but that people kill people. In the past year there has been 372 mass shootings in 2015 in the U.S. Approximately 33,636 deaths due to firearms each year. Many other countries do not have a big issue on homicides due to
“If a child can’t open a bottle of Aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull a trigger on a gun.”