Gun Control In The U.S. Essay, Research Paper

Gun control, as we know it, consists of the government

restricting the ability of individual citizens to purchase weapons.

The different types of gun control vary from waiting periods between

when you purchase the gun and when you actually get it, background

checks so that high-risk people can’t purchase guns through legal

channels, and completely banning certain types of guns. There are

countless ways for criminals to avoid these government regulations,

causing them to only render the ability of innocent citizens

protecting their home and family’s ability to purchase guns.

The “waiting period” method of gun control is basically a

two-step process. The first step in the procedure is that the person

wanting a gun goes to his local shop (or calls a reputable mail order

outlet) to place the initial order. Then, he must wait one to two

weeks while the government performs a small background check for past

criminal activities, disorderly conduct, or lack of mental/emotional

stability. During this time, if the purchaser of the gun wanted the

gun for impulse reasons (out of rage), it is hoped that they will not

still want to cause bodily harm after a couple weeks.

The problem with this method of gun control is that it stops

the ordinary citizen from purchasing a gun on the whim, but it

actually protects the common criminal. Underage buyers and other

delinquents can purchase mass quantities of weapons through “dummy

buyers” that have clean backgrounds. So if a burglar enters a house

with full intention to maim or kill, the innocent victim (who can’t

get a gun to protect his family because he was arrested for drunk

driving seven years ago) is simply a victim of a law that supports

black market trade. There are over 200 million registered guns in

circulation (Larson), and they are the ones that will not be killing

our children. The unregistered ones are owned by murderers, rapists,

and thieves.

Another practiced technique of preventing dangerous firearms

from killing honest people is to ban an entire type of weapon. The

AK-47 is a commonly-used example of that. Again, the criminals still

have limited access to the weapon through underground channels, but

these banned weapons are so powerful that there is really is not

practical purpose for them in the home (or in hunting).

This can easily be adverted by the common criminal who knows

anything about the way guns are assembled. A semi-automatic machine

gun can be converted into a fully-automatic gun with a little

handcraft. A shotgun can become a bloody powerful weapon by

sawing-off the tip of it. Obviously, new methods of gun control are

needed to produce desired results. In the first half of 1991, fifty

children under the age of seventeen had been shot to death. If we

continue to monitor the sale of firearms, there must be new techniques

that can watch where the guns end up. And if we decide that we

can/will not go down that track, we must make that judgement

earnestly, and without haste, because it will decide the future of The

United State of America as we know it.

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Bibliography

Larson, Erik. “The Story of a Gun”, The Atlantic Monthly. January 1993

Pooley, Eric. “Kids with Guns.” , New York. August 5, 1991.