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Essay: Regulating Gun Ownership: Limit Private Gun Ownership to Reduce U.S. Suicides and Homicides

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  • Subject area(s): Sample essays
  • Reading time: 7 minutes
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  • Published: 1 June 2019*
  • Last Modified: 18 September 2024
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 1,905 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 8 (approx)

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The lack of gun control in the US in the past decades has allowed guns to act as instruments of death, in mass school shootings, suicides, drug trafficking, and other forms of homicide. Gun related crimes and reliable data show that stricter gun laws and policies must be implemented to regulate both legal and illegal gun ownership for the U.S. to see any substantial decrease in crime.

The lack of gun regulation in the U.S. makes it easy for anybody to obtain a gun. The widespread private ownership of guns accounts for a large portion of our crime rates. “Criminals rarely buy their guns from a license dealer – most obtain them by buying or borrowing from family members or friends, or stealing, or making a connection in the underground market. Where firearms ownership is widespread, it will be easier for delinquents and gang members and predatory criminals to obtain one”(Cook. 57). The 2nd amendment allows anyone and everyone to have easy access to weapons, making it almost impossible to avoid incidents. Private gun ownership may seem harmless if it is in the hands on somebody “trustworthy”, however, the lack of screenings and regulations make it difficult to determine who is qualified to own a gun and whether there is a possibly for that gun to land in the wrong hands. Assuming that a person has gone through a screening and passed any conditions, we cannot guarantee that a family member, friend, or criminal with ill intentions wouldn’t get their hands on it. “The biggest loophole in the retail market is that private sales – which do not involve license dealers – are effectively unregulated. It is estimated that 40 percent of retail gun sales occur between private individuals, at flea markets and gun shows, and back yards, and over the Internet. Criminals and terrorists can readily obtain guns in these places” (Hemenway. 146). Our current gun policies do not guarantee that the wrong people won’t get their hands on guns, in fact, they make it rather easy for them to do so. Everyday there are more and easier ways of getting your hands on a gun whether it be through the black market or even your family members. The lack of restrictions on who can purchase a gun opens up a door to more crime and allows private individuals to control the gun market. Putting such power and control in the hands of potentially dangerous people increases the risk of homicide. The issue comes down to regulating how many guns are being manufactured and sold and who is buying these guns because even a legally purchased gun can easily find its way into the hands of a criminals.

For years the N.R.A has used its political influence to keep necessary gun regulations from being implemented by relying on false information and deliberately exploiting ignorance. The fact is that it's fairly difficult for the public to obtain accurate and reliable information on the effects of guns; that ignorance is often abused by gun lobbies to make it difficult to recognize the true nature of the gun issue in America. It is justifiable to claim that the information circulated by the gun lobby would support the protection of gun ownership and leave little space for the public to come to their own opinions on the issue of gun regulation.

Kristof mentions that the N.R.A. has started advocating for women empowerment by protecting the right to carry a concealed gun. When their programs like “Refuse To Be a Victim” and “love at first shot” reach out to women, they fail to mention the negatives to keeping a gun in your home. Having a gun in your household increases the risk of suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries. For adults and children with suicidal tendencies, easy access to a firearm increases the risk of a potential suicide. For women, keeping a gun at home actually puts them in greater danger in “domestic violence situations”. As a woman, this issue concerns me because I want my opinion to be accurately represented, especially when it involves my safety and the safety of my rights.

Both legal and illegal private gun ownership increases the risk of suicides and incidents and to prevent both intentional and unintentional incidents at home, private gun ownership must be strictly regulated. “There are 31,000 gun deaths every year in America, including about 19,000 suicides, many of which are children… In New York City, our suicide rate is less than half the national average, and one of the differences is that New York has tough gun laws”(Webster. 1901). Keeping a gun in a household poses a risk for adults and children with suicidal tendencies in that easy access to this lethal weapon increases the risk of a potential suicide. The presence of a gun in a household with suicidal members makes the chance of a negative outcome much more likely. Although guns are not credited to all occurrences of suicide, they account for a big fraction of the numbers and make the risk much greater. The numbers show that the lack of regulation of private gun ownership is detrimental to the well-being of suicidal adults and children and yet, no action is being taken to stop such incidents. A gun purchased legally and with no ill intentions can still be the cause of death, showing that a gun doesn’t have to be on the streets for it to cause harm. “Firearms are the second leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States and are the second most frequent cause of death overall for Americans ages fifteen to twenty-four. Since 1960, more than 1.3 million Americans have died in firearm suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries”(Diaz. 22). Although guns account for a large portion of our suicide rates, they also account for unintentional incidents. It cannot be denied that keeping a gun at home poses a risk for children and young adults so obviously the next step would be to impose stricter laws and policies, but no significant action has been taken. There is a clear and distinct correlation between the lack of gun control and the increase in intentional and accidental incidents which needs to gain more recognition from the public.

So far, the N.R.A. has blamed the news media, the film industry, and video games for the gun violence issue in the U.S; essentially everything except for guns. Those reasons together only account for a small portion of gun related crime and do not justify the constant occurrences of mass shootings, suicides, and other homicides. Guns make mass shootings like the ones that happened at Sandy Hook, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Sutherland Springs, Texas, possible. The issue of gun control in the U.S. has gotten to the point where firearm incidents have become a regularity. School shootings are a major issue in the United States, making students and teachers alike feel unsafe in a school environment. Institutions of education should be places that kids and adults can come to and feel as safe as they would at home, although the dangers of guns are increasingly prevalent in homes too. “It is also a sad sign that many high schools in the United States now believe it is necessary to run “code red” drills or lockdowns, the modern versions of the 19505 nuclear war drill. Students are trained to lock the classroom door and make the room look empty so potential killers will move on to easier targets (Ruane 2001)”(Hemenway. 89)

This training has been implemented in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools for years for the purpose of preparing us in the case of a threat in the building instead of doing something to prevent the threat in the first place. Schools should be an environment in which children feel safe to come to and do what they're supposed to do which is to learn. Students are made to adapt to the situation instead of action being taken by the government to remove such threats. “The urgency of the need for change was dramatically underscored on December 14th, 2012, when a young man named Adam Lanza walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – home of the National Shooting Sports Foundation- And shot to death twenty first graders and six school employees with a 223 caliber Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle. He then used a handgun to kill himself. Lanza had earlier killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, with a  22 caliber rifle”( Diaz. 234). Adam Lanza had access to three different weapons which made it possible for him to kill 27 innocent people, a majority of which were children. Although the incident sparked debate over guns, the NRA still blamed violent video games and such for the incident. Gun lobbyists gun-rights advocates stress the flawed ideology “guns don't kill people, people kill people” but put aside the fact that a person could not kill that many people at once without the help of a gun. Guns make mass shootings like the ones that happened at Sandy, Hook; Parkland, Florida; and Sutherland Springs, Texas, possible. “Determinately clutched throughout this ritual is the studied premise that the latest “gun rampage” is an aberration, something akin to the sudden appearance of a spaceship that spews death randomly for ten or fifteen minutes, and then just as suddenly disappears. But the cold fact is that mass shootings can no longer accurately be called aberrations in the United States. They are here, now, and everywhere – in our homes, our schools, are churches, our places of work, our shopping malls, and even our military bases”(Diaz. 21). This fact was underscored by the March For Our Lives movement, taking place on March 24th of 2018, which was a student led demonstration in response to the Parkland, Florida shooting. After 17 people were shot and killed, students all over the U.S. walked out of school to show their objection to how the government has been responding to the gun threat. Although gun lobbyists often choose to ignore the significance of gun violence and the government hasn’t been implementing proper gun laws, students have been using their voices to bring attention to the issue.

Guns have a direct link to the success of drug trafficking in and out of the U.S. With the help of lethal weapons and the knowledge of the obvious threat that a gun can pose, ruthless cartels that ship illegal drugs to and from the US have gained more authority and spurred more violence. “A Mexican foreign Ministry official stated that “what makes drug related crime so violent is the firepower the narcotics traffickers can gather. It's more than the police can handle” (Hemenway. 204). The black market for guns and drug trafficking work together to create a system of organized crime. The police alone cannot handle the problem because the threat is widespread and mostly undetectable. Without the issuing of stricter gun policies, there is a very small possibility that the underground production and shipping of illegal drugs can be dealt with. Guns are evidently very effective in allowing power and authority to be held in the hands of dangerous people and add to the already serious homicide problem in the US. Enforcing more gun control laws would decrease the amount of guns in circulation, the shipping of illegal drugs into the U.S, the power held by these cartels, and homicide rates.

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