Gun Control To Prevent Murder
Crime may never end but maybe there’s a way to eliminate the rate at which guns influence it. The United States government should make the process of a felon obtaining a gun increasingly difficult, the complete banning of high-capacity magazines, and enacting gun control of mandatory safety features, leading to the decrease of the average mass shootings, suicide rates, and violent crimes.
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, there are currently over 55,000 licensed gun owners in the US. Licensed Gun dealers and Pawn shops are required to do background checks on customers but a majority of states have gun sellers that are not licensed and therefore are not required to perform a background check when buying a gun. In 2016 during a speech, Barack Obama addressed what he calls the ‘‘Gun law loophole’’, where one can easily buy a gun online, privately, or without a background check. He later stated, “We’ve created a system in which dangerous people are allowed to play by a different set of rules.’’ Over 40 percent of the guns purchased in the states are done anonymously through friends or local gun shows. On top of that almost 10 percent of those people are known to have some type of criminal record. It has also been shown that gangs use 30 or 90 rounds to make up for their lack of accuracy and targeting which ended up increasing the rate of harm caused by just shooting. In an argument or situation involving conflict, the FBI found, in many cases, that feuds that involved gun threats increased the overall violence of the situation. Institute of Medicine in 2013 stated that almost every gun used in a criminal act was obtained via legal transaction where a friend with a gun license bought a gun for a non-licensed friend. In other cases, however, it showed that guns were stolen from someone and used in a crime. On top of all the crimes committed by guns the biggest crime that goes on is actually in the depths of your wallet. Gun violence cost the U.S. $1.4 billion in Medicare just this year.
A more prominent occurrence in the last decade is the idea of armed civilians feeling as though they can help, in a dangerous situation like mass shootings, when in fact they are more of a risk and end up increasing the violence of the situation making it become deadly. It has shown that in debates about gun control the second amendment is brought up with the right to bear arms but without the thought or regard of an individuals responsibility. ‘‘The average gun owner, no matter how responsible, is not trained in law enforcement or on how to handle life-threatening situations,’’ says Assistant Professor of Writing at Kutztown University. The more guns you add to the problem the more volatile and dangerous the situation becomes. Many law enforcement agents will tell you that the first thing they are trained on is disarming the weapon from the shooter. Americans tend to focus more on terrorism then gun violence and it shows because from 2005-2015 only 71 Americans died from terrorist attacks in the U.S. while 301,797 died by a gun. Out of around 108,000 people that get shot a year about 33,000 of them die.
From the late 1990s through the early 2000’ s there were over more than 270,237 suicides from firearms in the U.S. In studies following rates of suicide it was shown that as gun ownership decreased suicide rates went down. With the already known rate of homicides by guns enacting gun control of mandatory safety features would decrease the number of accidental deaths by guns. Accidental deaths are more prone to occur with children under the age of 10 who find the gun in their house. They play with it as if it is a toy and one thing leading to the next end up seriously injuring or killing themselves.
