More than one hundred thousand people in the United States of America are shot by guns each year. This pressing issue has sparked a national debate on whether gun control should be expanded or diminished. Most republicans believe that gun control is the reason for this horrific statistic, while most democrats believe that not enough gun control is the cause for this extremely, terrible effect. Unfortunately, the fact remains that gun control has never truly been put into effect, and therefore must be put into effect in order to understand truly whether it creates a positive or negative impact on society.
In order to understand how gun control affects society, it is crucial to understand when and how gun control was implemented in the past. Gun control wasn’t even considered being implemented until the bloody “Tommy Gun” era was created by the gangster Al Capone. In an attempt to combat the gangsters and their guns, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the National Firearms Act of 1934. This was the first national gun control law in the United States of America. This put a heavy tax on the purchase of guns and required anybody who purchased a gun to register it (“The History of Gun Control Legislation”). After 1938 when President Franklin revised his bill, the idea of gun control, for the most part, was put on halt until the year of 1968. In response to the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, President Lyndon Baines Johnson started the fight for gun control again. President Johnson passed the Gun Control Act of 1964. It forbid all convicted felons, drug users and the mentally ill from purchasing guns; made the age to purchase handguns from a federally licensed dealer from eighteen to twenty one; and expanded the requirements to purchase guns to more gun dealers and enforced more detailed record-keeping (“The History of Gun Control Legislation”). However, after only twenty years, complaints from the public about the abuse of the government’s power prompted the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986. This law limited the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from inspecting gun dealers more than once a year, with follow-up inspections allowed only if multiple violations are found. An amendment also passed banning civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986. Weapons created and registered before this date were not affected (“The History of Gun Control Legislation”). From 1986 onwards the idea of whether gun control should be placed or not has been on going. And the placement of gun control laws has been present based on whether the president is republican or democrat since then.
Throughout the history of the United States of America it has never been illegal to buy any sort of gun, whether it is a glock or a machinegun, from a person who has possessed that gun before the gun control law was set. In addition, when one buys a gun from a third person seller, there is no requirement to register the purchase.This loophole is that the achilles heel of all gun control laws. It essentially makes all the current gun control laws useless.
Conservative views on gun control are extremely against the implementation of gun control to society. The biggest claim republicans and conservatives make is; no matter how tough gun control is, bad people will find a way to do bad stuff with and without gun control. One example on why gun control is pointless is displayed in the UK: “Now that modern handguns are no longer legal to have in the UK, let us take a look at some murder rates. The rate for intentional homicide in the UK in 1996—the year of the Dunblane Massacre—was 1.12 per 100,000. It was 1.24 in 1997, when the Firearms Act went into effect, and 1.43 in 1998. The rate rose to a peak of 2.1 in 2002 and has fallen since to 1.23 as of 2010. These numbers have, however, been called into question due to possible under-reporting of violent crimes in the UK (Flamehorse)” This shows that since strict gun control has been implemented in the United Kingdom, there has practically been no change in the murder rate, and could have made the murder rate go higher per 100,000 people.
Some gun control opponents will go as far to say that putting a ban on assault rifles could put lives on the line. These opponents argue that the second amendment was placed not only to make sure government does not abuse its power, but incase of an invasion, when the government cannot protect its civilians on time, they will have the tools necessary to defend them. If the government today cannot protect its citizens, then citizens with lower class weapons, such as pistols, will not put up much of a fight (Flamehorse). This is a valid point, fortunately it seems that the likelihood of such a horrible situation happening is minimal.
Of Course, the most crucial fact that gun control opponents seem to say is that laws do not apply to criminals. “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. The sole thing the criminally-minded care about is not getting caught. 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 (Flamehorse).” In addition, with over 300 million current firearms in America, getting a gun will never be a difficult quest (7 Reasons Liberals Are Wrong on Gun Control). This idea can be seen displayed in Chicago, Illinois. As a consequence to the high murder rate of Chicago, city lawmakers enacted a gun control law that forbid the sale of guns completely. However, since it was enacted in 2010, where there was 432 murder, it went up to 500 in 2012 proving that gun control has no effect on whether gun violence crimes occur or not (Flamehorse).
On the other side, there are democrats who believe in gun control. One major point is that the young generation seems to be in favor of it. In other words, the future is for gun control. In a survey conducted by a high school scholar, 70% of people aged 22 or younger thought that more gun control would result in less gun violence and crimes (Ribak). This new generation isn’t wrong at all about the benefits of gun control, democrats would argue. Around 1996, Australia went through an astounding change revolving around gun control, “Prime Minister, John Howard, launched perhaps the most aggressive clamp-down on gun ownership in history.
Around 650,000 automatic and semi-automatic weapons were destroyed and a whole raft of checks and controls brought in. The end result? The first decade of the law alone saw a fifty-nine percent drop in Australian gun-homicides, while non-firearm-related homicides stayed level. In other words, people didn’t switch to machetes or poison so much as they stopped killing altogether. As for mass shootings: well, Australia’s gone all the way from eleven a decade (1986-96) to zero.”(Morris M.).
This proved that tough gun control can have a positive impact on society in the way many millennials believe it can have.
That is not all, Democrats often point out that most massacres happen with guns that are legal to purchase, and therefore, if the government bans them, massacres will occur less often. From 1982 to 2012, the United States of America had about 62 mass massacres. 49 of those 62 massacres were conducted with weapons that could be attained legally. In addition, half of all the massacres were conducted with assault weapons or high capacity magazines. This shows that if there was restriction on certain types of guns, lives would’ve been saved (Morris M.). Let’s say there are restrictions, in any case it would not help the victims according to republicans, who will counter by saying it does not matter since 98% of all mass shootings occur on gun-free zones (Morse). However, in the 33 mass public shootings that occurred between January 2009 to June 2014, 18 of them happened in non gun-free zones, proving that shooters are not tar geting gun free zones (Defilippis).