The Crime Of Gun Control

1632 Words7 Pages
Is there a more heinous act than to kill a child? After an event like a school shooting, our anger drives us to seek different ways to prevent a similar event from ever happening again. In an attempt to do so, we focus on guns as the cause of the problem and try to put more regulations in place. Who would not want regulations on gun ownership and establish places where guns are prohibited, like schools, if it would prevent or help reduce these crimes from happening? However, statistics have shown that gun regulations are ineffective in reducing gun related crimes and may actually increase the occurrence of them, ultimately leading to an increasing death toll. The gun is not committing the crime; it is the person pulling the trigger.…show more content…
After doing more research on this topic, I have to agree with the latter. People have been lobbying for more gun control laws recently following “mass shooting” events, to prevent these gun related crimes, but their effort is misdirected. A gun is a tool in the hands of a killer. It is a means to construct violence, but it is not the cause of violence. “There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous men.” -Robert A. Heinlein (Guns). Putting more legislation in place to regulate guns will be a futile attempt at reducing gun related crime, because the gun is not the cause of these acts. Three gun laws currently in place have illustrated this fact. The Gun Control Act of 1968 makes it illegal for “felons, fugitives, illegal drug users, adjudicated mental defectives, illegal aliens, those dishonorably discharged from the armed forces and those who have renounced U.S. citizenship” from being able to possess any firearm (Crooker 90). This law says that felons cannot possess a firearm and yet a majority of those responsible for these crimes are repeat offenders (Gun facts). It also indicates that people with mental illnesses cannot have a gun, but there have been several shootings that involved the mentally ill. Any school shooting or other “mass shooting” event would show this fact. No sane individual would go and kill large amounts of people. It is against the law for these kinds of people to own guns, but
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