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Essay about The NRA Killed Gun Control Legislation

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The NRA Killed Gun Control Legislation

By the year 2003, it is expected that firearms will cause the most injury-related deaths in the United States, surpassing even automobile accidents. Poll after poll have revealed that most Americans favor stricter gun control laws. Five recent suburban school shootings have demonstrated that when guns and kids mix, tragedy results. Yet gun control legislation remains at a standstill.

The battle for stricter gun-control laws has not been without victories. In 1968, Congress passed the Gun Control Act in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and Senator Robert Kennedy. The law mandated stricter licensing requirements, prohibited the sale of …show more content…

However, the thrill of the above victories could not prevent the agony of defeat that the country faced between October 1997 and June 1998. There were five suburban school shootings in that time, in Pearl Mississippi, West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansa;, Edinboro, Pennsylvania; and Springfield, Oregon. This unspeakable violence left sixteen dead, including eleven children and teenagers. The shooters ranged in age from 11 to 16 years old.

Although no one can explain the "why" of these tragedies, recent statistics give insight into the "how": A 1990 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) survey found that one in twenty high school students had carried a gun in the past month, while a 1994 Harris poll found that only one in five students would tell a teacher if he or she knew that another student was bringing weapons to school. Where do these kids get their guns? The Harris poll found that only 43% of parents of minors keep their guns safely locked, which means that an estimated 1.2 million latchkey elementary school students can access the guns kept in their houses. The consequences of the latter statistic were brutally obvious in Jonesboro, when sixth grader Andrew Golden and eighth grader Mitchell Johnson opened fire on a crowd of students with guns taken from a glass

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