Gun Control
The people of the United States believe that there are laws that are being enforced to ensure only certain individuals can obtain firearms and that they live in a safe country. However, some of the laws they believe are being enforced, may not even exist, meaning they were never and still are not being enforced. This is one reason as to why there are citizens who are backing for more gun control.
For instance, as found in a scholarly journal article titled, "What Will It Take? Terrorism, Mass Murder, Gang Violence, and Suicides: The American Way, or Do We Strive for a Better Way?", Katherine L. Record and Lawrence O. Gostin say that based on polling, a majority of Americans believe that those on the terrorist watch list are unable to legally purchase a gun. Yet, this is not true. The idea that those who are a threat to our nation’s security can buy guns with no repercussions is not something that should make citizens of the United States feel safe. Someone who is in the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS), a database of people who cannot purchase a firearm, can simply go to a gun show and easily buy a gun.
For instance, as found in a scholarly journal article titled, "What Will It Take? Terrorism, Mass Murder, Gang Violence, and Suicides: The American Way, or Do We Strive for a Better Way?", Katherine L. Record and Lawrence O. Gostin say that based on polling, a majority of Americans believe that those on the terrorist watch list are unable to legally purchase a gun. Yet, this is not true. The idea that those who are a threat to our nation’s security can buy guns with no repercussions is not something that should make citizens of the United States feel safe. Someone who is in the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS), a database of people who cannot purchase a firearm, can simply go to a gun show and easily buy a gun.
To start, those who are already felons, illegal residents, abusers of illegal drugs, dishonorably discharged individuals from the Armed Forces, and individuals considered mentally ill are identified as people who should be unable to purchase guns and also are in the NICS database . Albeit it sounds like it is sufficiently stopping those named persons from obtaining weapons, it is not. One of the flaws with this is that the individuals mentioned previously are not often checked into the database. The reason being is, each state is responsible for submitting the records of people who meet the criteria for not being able to purchase firearms and the United States government cannot make states do this. For instance, less than 20% of prisoners that responded in a survey said that they had purchased their guns at a store. This alone shows that 80% of criminals get their weapons from places where background checks are more than likely not done.
You can see this problem in the periodical article, "Sniper fails to trigger alarm among American politicians” written by Rosemary Neill, where she had found that “…the foundation (Americans for Gun Safety Foundation) has discovered that over a 30-month period, 10,000 felons and other Americans supposedly banned from buying guns (including the mentally ill) had obtained one”
In a book called, The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, written by Philip Cook and Kristen Goss they state, “Approximately one million Americans have died from gunshot wounds in homicides, accidents, and suicides during just the last three decades—more than the sum of total of combat deaths in all the wars in US history”. Cook and Goss also found the statistics of gun deaths for 2010, and in that year only 31,672 people lost their lives to firearms, which they also stated fell just below the number of traffic deaths for the year. From the 31,672 deaths, only 606 were unintentional. Considering that traffic accidents are, for the most part, accidental, it is surprising that over 31,000 people died by the means of gun with the intent of their life being ended.
For instance, Amanda Gutterman writes in an article called “States With Most Gun Deaths Have High Gun Ownership And Weak Gun Laws, Report Shows” for the Huffington Post, she found that in the US, the states with the least restrictive gun laws have the higher gun death rates. A prime example of this is Alaska which has the least restrictive gun laws in the US and she talks about this by saying, “The state saw 19.59 deaths per 100,000 people, which is significantly above the national average of 10.64 deaths per 100,000” If you compare the total amount of firearm deaths between Alaska and the UK, it comes out very close. Alaska has around 143 deaths and the UK has 147. The significant difference between this which should be noted is that the United Kingdom has a population of around 64 million people and Alaska’s population is around 730,000. This is proof that less guns lead to less gun deaths.
Sources:
Graph created by Hayden M.
- Cook, Philip, and Goss, Kristen. The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Print.
- Neill, Rosemary. "Sniper fails to trigger alarm among American politicians." The Australian. 18 October 2002. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.
- Record, Katherine L., and Lawrence O. Gostin. "What Will It Take? Terrorism, Mass Murder, Gang Violence, and Suicides: The American Way, or Do We Strive for a Better Way?." University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 47.3 (2014): 555-74. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.
Graph created by Hayden M.