Why Gun Control Laws Should Be Stricter in The Us

Millions of guns are sold every year in America with no questions asked. Looking at recent acts of violence in America you can clearly see that guns play a big role in these horrendous acts. Some people think that America should have stricter gun laws or abolish citizens from buying guns altogether. Others think that it’s a violation of our second amendment and should not be changed. But when should the government draw the line? There are more ways to show the harmful effects of guns in our society than just statistics. Stories of parents who’ve lost their children and children that are left fatherless or motherless due to gun violence show the negative impacts of guns more than any statistics could ever show. That is why gun laws in America should be much stricter than they are now.

Guns are hazardous objects and unless you’re a policeman or, you use firearms to hunt then why would you need a gun. According to John Hopkins Center For Gun Policy and Research “More than 31,000 people a year in the United States die from gunshot wounds and over 80,000 are injured” That may seem like a small number to some considering there are 350 million plus people living in the United States but, the effects of gun violence extend far beyond these casualties gun violence shapes the lives of millions of Americans who witness it, know someone who was shot, or lives in fear of the next shooting. Bruce D. Perry, a psychiatrist and one of the country’s leading experts on childhood trauma says “Even kids who come from middle-class and upper-middle-class communities literally don’t feel safe in schools.” This is due to the fact of the many school shootings that have occurred over the last few years. Since 2000 there have been 130 school shootings, sixty people killed, and about sixty wounded (Chui and Horton).

There are many gun control laws that could be passed to help prevent gun violence but getting everyone to agree on them is the issue. To get enough people to agree to pass a gun control law Congress will have to find a middle ground, meaning not completely taking away guns but adding restrictions or making it harder to buy a gun. One plausible gun law to help control gun violence and save lives in the process is gun magazine size restriction. This would help stop mass shootings by limiting the amount of ammunition a gun can hold. Another possible law that could be passed to help prevent gun violence is stricter background checks. This would help in stopping criminals from buying guns and this bill would hold federal and state agencies accountable if they fail to upload criminal history records to the background check system. A third conceivable law to help stop gun violence is an ammunition restriction law. An ammunition restriction law is different from a magazine restriction law because a magazine restriction law controls how much ammo a gun can hold at once whereas an ammunition restriction law controls how much ammo a person can buy at one time. This law would help prevent gun violence and mass shootings like the one that took place in Las Vegas. SWAT teams found hundreds of rounds of ammo in the shooter’s hotel room and thousands more in his home in Nevada (Millstein). If this law was passed, people could not have that much ammunition at one time. All these laws are plausible because they don’t take away guns from the people, but they take higher precautions in gun sales.

Many pro-gun supporters will try to tell you that they have the right to self-defense and they wouldn’t feel safe not being able to own a gun or carry one around. Yet, according to procon.org, ‘between 2007 and 2011 0.79% of victims protected themselves with a threat of use or use of a firearm’ (Truman and Planty). That proves that a very low percentage of people actually use firearms to protect themselves. Even when shootings happen in gun-happy places, where armed people are sure to be nearby, this vigilante scenario simply doesn’t work. That’s because pulling a gun out and shooting back in the chaos of a mass shooting just makes things worse. People will say that guns make us safer, but we already have more guns per capita than any other nation on Earth. According to UNODC Homicide Statistics, the U.S also has the highest gun homicide rate of any developed nation. Its rate is 32 times that of Great Britain’s. When it comes to the Second Amendment, it is not an unlimited right to own a gun. Gun control laws are just as old or older than the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment of the US Constitution protects individual gun ownership. Another argument pro-gun supports will make is recreational gun use. Which sports require an assault weapon that fires 900 rounds per minute? And is there any mass-killing capacity that would be too much for your recreational sport? You don’t need AR-15 styled weapons for hunting.

Another reason why there should be stricter gun control laws is that there would be fewer suicides. Suicide rates have only been rising over the last few years. According to CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics In 2016, there were 44,965 recorded suicides. A little over half of those suicides were with a firearm. “People who live in U.S. states with high rates of household gun ownership are almost four times more likely to die by gun suicide than in states where fewer households own guns”. The U.S. firearm suicide rate is eight times that of other high-income countries. Americans need to be more educated on the prevalence of firearm suicide, how having access to a gun increases the risk of suicide, and steps they can take to reduce risk. Most gun-owning Americans think that owning a firearm makes them safer. The truth is that access to a firearm increases the risk of suicide for all people in the household by almost four times as much (Anglemyer and Rutherford). In the absence of public health campaigns led by the federal government, trusted experts like law enforcement, gun dealers, and medical professionals have all launched campaigns that help inform Americans about the risks of firearms in the home and how to reduce those risks.

To reiterate, we’ve already seen the horrors of what guns can do. Thousands of Americans get killed by gun violence and millions more affected. The only thing that can be done to help stop and prevent this is, by standing up and urging the government to pass these gun regulation laws so that the amount of gun violence in America goes down. You never know if you will be the next one to hear a loved one’s name on the news in the next act of gun violence and that is why you need to take action now. 

Works Cited

1. Chui, C., & Horton, A. (n.d.). School shootings in America since 2013. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/02/america-mass-shootings-gun-violence
2. Johns Hopkins Center For Gun Policy and Research. (n.d.). Gun Violence Statistics. https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-gun-policy-and-research/_pdfs/US-Gun-Homicide-Map.pdf
3. Millstein, S. (2017). What would change if Congress passed gun control? National Public Radio (NPR). https://www.npr.org/2017/11/07/562632319/what-would-change-if-congress-passed-gun-control
4. Truman, J. L., & Planty, M. (2013). Criminal Victimization, 2012. Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv12.pdf
5. Anglemyer, A., & Rutherford, G. (2013). Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high-income countries. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 67(11), 1069-1071.
6. Center for American Progress. (2016). America under fire: An analysis of gun violence in the United States and the link to weak gun laws. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2016/06/10063907/GunsOnCampus-report-June2016.pdf
7. Cook, P. J., & Ludwig, J. (2000). Guns in America: National survey on private ownership and use of firearms. National Institute of Justice. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/182530.pdf
8. Grossman, D. C., Mueller, B. A., Riedy, C., Dowd, M. D., Villaveces, A., Prodzinski, J., Nakagawara, J., Howard, J., & Rivara, F. P. (2005). Gun storage practices and risk of youth suicide and unintentional firearm injuries. JAMA, 293(6), 707-714.
9. Kellermann, A. L., & Rivara, F. P. (1992). Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership. New England Journal of Medicine, 327(7), 467-472.
10. Violence Policy Center. (2021). Firearm suicide: Analysis, research, and prevention. https://vpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Firearm-Suicide-Analysis-Research-and-Prevention-2021.pdf