Let us remove guns from everyone. No more guns in the house, no more armed police, none at all. How do you picture the outcome? It takes one twisted person to acquire an illegal gun and your law has put you in the corner. Every time a horrific event takes place, such as in Las Vegas, the majority of the media and people who are anti-Second Amendment reevaluate the laws regarding the legality of owning and carrying firearms. The United States must release its overly strict hold on gun owners. The United States is a nation that is becoming increasingly less united over disagreements such as gun control. We have the data to prove the uselessness of gun control and the debate must be put to rest. We should stop worrying about our founding fathers’ decision to allow citizens to own and carry firearms and we should fix our attention to the disarming and defense against those who are inclined to commit crimes.
In a letter to James Madison in 1787, Thomas Jefferson spoke the truth when he stated “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” speaking of firearms. I believe that the individuals who desire more control over guns are injuring more people in their riots than guns themselves. Joking aside, let us take a look at the United Kingdom, where almost all hand guns are banned from civilian use; in 1996, a year before the Second Firearms Act was put in place to take guns out of civilian’s hands, the rate for intentional homicide was 1.12 per 100,000. The following year in 1997, when this firearm act took place, the rate increased to 1.24. Fast forward only five years to 2002 and the rate rose to a peak of 2.1! The United Kingdom is the most violent country in Europe. Crime Correspondent, Richard Edwards, reports that there are more than four times as many violent crimes in the UK as there are in the United States. Although the rate has dropped to around 1.25 as of late, the Second Firearms Act of 1997 is a political disaster.
Firearms save far more lives than they take. They prevent more injuries than they inflict. The Gun Owners of America report that guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year—or about 6,850 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8 percent of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his or her attacker. I believe that it is even more important for a woman to carry a weapon for self-protection. The Gun Owners of American also report that as many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse. Firearms dramatically reduce crime nationwide with one-half million self-defense uses. Every year, as many as one-half million citizens defend themselves with a firearm away from home. The protection these weapons provide is unmatched.
An analysis of FBI crime statistics found that states that adopted carry laws reduced murders by 8.5 percent, rapes by 5 percent, aggravated assaults by 7 percent, and robberies by 3 percent. If those states not having concealed carry laws had adopted such laws in 1992, then approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults and over 11,000 robberies would have been avoided yearly. It does not stop there. “Gun free zones” are great places—for killers. The Crime Research Prevention Center determined in a study that since 1950, nearly 99 percent of mass shootings have taken place in gun free zones. If I had to put myself in the wretched shoes of a killer, am I going to Texas where everyone around me is armed, or am I going to a gun free zone? These murderers are looking to cause as much carnage as possible before being put to an end. Politifact writer, Amy Sherman stated that in the wake of the mass shootings in both the Pulse night club and Fort Lauderdale Airport, Florida lawmakers are expected to expand the areas where people can carry firearms. It has become obvious that these “gun safe zones” really are more dangerous than anywhere else.
Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. When the ban went in place, few politicians or people involved in the movement could imagine the outcome. Very few people headed the ban and the alcohol market grew rampant and flourished, even more so than before the ban. This opened a new can of worms for career criminals, such as Al Capone, who took advantage of the absurd law by bringing importation to entire cities. If you replace every alcohol reference with a gun, you will see the outcome of complete gun control. The only difference being that the outcome would be much more deadly. Considering that Prohibition was one of the most dangerous ages in American history, we do not want to see it again, at an even worse level.
Gun laws are all founded on the principle of making a nation safer by limiting its civilian population’s access to guns, but laws against murder and violence do not apply to those who have given up on life and intend to die while killing as many people as they can. Laws against theft do not apply to a person who intends to steal something. Some are reformed in prison, but in large part, those who want to break a law are not going to feel remorse when they are caught. Give them a chance and they will do it again. In a perfect world, gun control would mean going house to house throughout the nation and taking away every single firearm, including muzzle loaders. That would be impossible. Regardless of its constitutionality, gun owners would either fight back until there were a nationwide civil war or simply hide their weapons and claim they have none. Since most of those in the US are unregistered, no one knows who has what. Owners could always claim they destroyed those that are registered.
Those who are pro-gun control bring up the statistic that successful interventions by armed civilians had only occurred in 1.6 percent of all mass shootings since 1980. In my experience regarding this topic, statistics do not mean all too much, because I know that when I am armed, I can protect myself and potentially one day, my family. This is not to be taken lightly by any gun owner though. The trouble is, you might be an ace down the range, but when you are in the middle of utter carnage, it is another thing altogether. That is why one of the few possibly successful interventions, at the end of the 2002 Appalachian School of Law shooting, came from an ex-cop. Training makes a world of a difference. Consider that the intervention rate was only 1.6 percent, imagine the rate it will be in the future with laws that continue to be increasingly constricting to gun owners.
More guns means more homicides, right? In 1996, Australia passed strict gun laws where 650,000 weapons were destroyed which resulted in a 59 percent decrease in gun related homicides. This is great to hear, but this is such an isolated and ignorant range of data. We have seen that in the United Kingdom that this is very untrue. Bastiat Institute and Boston University economist, Jeffery Miron states in his article entitled “Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross‐Country Analysis” that countries with the strictest gun-control laws also tended to have the highest homicide rates. A recent study in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy entitled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?” also takes a look to see if there is a correlation between the murder rate and the rate of gun ownership. There is none to be found.
Gun control sounds absolutely fantastic in theory, but in practice it will never be as successful as some believe it will be. In most areas of the world where you find gun control put to practice, you also will find an increase in homicides. In the United Kingdom, the act that increased gun control nearly doubled the number of homicides. And these “gun free zones” are more like safe spaces for the twisted minded killer. If the United States decides to remove its civilians’ firearms, it will work out just as well as the prohibition did on alcohol, except it would be a deadly disaster. The belief is that all criminals will put down their guns because some lawmaker said it was illegal. This is foolishness to have faith in. Criminals have no desire to follow rules and their desire is to cause as much havoc as possible. Gun control is like throwing mass-murderers meatballs to swing at, and they are hitting the world harder every time.