A Modest Proposal -Gun Control Essay, Research Paper

It seems that in the present day a person cannot look through a newspaper without reading some tragic article involving children and firearms. Such as seen in the Columbine School shooting on April the 20th 1999, where two seniors gunned down 16 fellow students and injured many more. What I propose is for the United States to ban the right to own all types of firearms, which should in theory end all firearm related deaths. There are only between 65 and 80 million Americans that own weapons, and between them there is a total of more than 200 million firearms in the Untied States. Taking all of these guns off the street should not be a problem because the government agencies have already shown that they can control the use of illegal things such as narcotics. If the Government can control something that is produced outside of the country and must be shipped to within our borders they should be able to easily enforce the ban on all weapons. The fact that armed citizens prevent crimes in over 2 million cases is not important as long as the murderers, rapist, robbers and all other criminals have no access to firearms or any other weapons, such as knives. Knives are being used much more often now days to commit murders than ever before. After all of these weapons have been banned the average American will not be in danger; therefore there will be no need for weapons in order to defend oneself. Also the fact that cities that have perhaps the most repressive laws regarding firearm ownership and possession by citizens has among the highest murder rates anywhere does not mean anything, those criminals could have gotten their weapons from anywhere.

The politicians will not hurt anyone with a ban on all weapons because things such as gun collecting are not important, they are simply hobbies that have no purpose. Just like bird watching or building little Barbie dollhouses. Hunting is also no longer important because its just a sport and is not needed with the technology that we have today. The politicians are doing the right thing when banning assault weapons because those guns look dangerous and the public should not be allowed to have dangerous looking weapons. In doing so the politicians also banned fully automatic weapons which has saved a lot of lives considering since 1932 there has been only one murder committed with an automatic weapon which was committed by an officer of the law. The fact that they have just recently banned them is not important in the overall picture.

The idea of common sense gun laws is ridiculous, because as long as there are guns on the street there are going to be murders committed with those very guns. The laws that are currently in affect do not seem to be working very well considering the murder rate is 6.3 murders per one hundred thousand, which is actually a pretty low average obtained since 1913. The only true way of lowering the murder rate is banning all firearms and restricting the use of other weapons such as knives, which account for over thirteen-percent of all murders. This should allow the number of violent crimes committed per year to drop drastically because these people that apparently go crazy will no longer have the luxury of having such great tools as firearms and knives to carry out there lunacy.