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Solutions to gun violence
Solutions to gun violence
Gun violence / gun control
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Cause and Effect
You turn on the news and you see it’s bursting with reports of a mass shooting in a popular site. You wonder why a person could commit such a crime and you think to yourself, was it because the person had a mental illness? How could someone with a mental illness be sold a gun so easily? Gun safety and gun rights are a big debate in America and there should be restrictions when selling a firearm to an individual. Banning gun sale to people with mental illness and background checks should be enforced with gun sale.
When a random person with no history of guns buys a firearm, what could happen? Crime with firearms has been at an all time high in America. In a survey conducted by Pew Research Center poll, they found that 85%
of people believed that background checks should be conducted when there is a gun sale and 79% of people agreed that the mentally ill should be banned from gun sale. Most people would be quick to assume anyone who causes a mass shooting would be mentally ill to do such a thing. When a company sells a gun to a person without a background check they are not capable of knowing what that person can do, which could cause crime. Whether or not a person has a license, you can’t read a person’s mind when they are buying a firearm. For example, the Sandy Hook shootings that took place on December 12, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. Police believed the shooter, Adam Lanza, was an undiagnosed Schizophrenic. Although he was undiagnosed, he could’ve had a past and conducting a background check would stop his gun sale and that shooting would’ve never happened. Imagine how a family feels when they find out their loved one was shot in a theater while enjoying a movie because someone decided to shoot innocent people? The effects on anyone going through a loss because their loved one was murdered by someone who was sold a gun with no background check. Soon, it is released that the shooter was a schizophrenic. Mentally ill with no background check buying a gun? It doesn’t seem right and it doesn’t seem fair. A family shouldn’t have to go through a loss because someone decided one day that they wanted to shoot a bunch of people because they had EASY access to a gun. With a background check and strict laws, anyone who has committed any crime and/or has a felony, they should not be allowed to purchase any type of gun. All around America and the rest of the world there are shootings every day. Gun crimes are high rated because people have easy access to guns. Even kids under the legal age limit have guns, how? How can we stop gun crimes? Background checks are a must. Banning any mentally ill individual from any purchase of a firearm is another solution, but what if we dig deeper? David K. Brawley, Otis Moss III, David Benke and Joel Mosbacher thought about a “smart gun” that didn’t shoot unless a person was authorized to shoot? What if a 16 year old got a hold of a gun and with the right technology, it didn’t fire because the firearm knew that he was underage and possibly committing a crime? The future could never be told, but a smart gun would be a brilliant idea. Thinking further than background checks and banning, we could change gun crimes, gun safety, and gun rights for the better.
Over the past years media has been overwhelmed with news about mass shootings happening around America and if mental illness is the primary cause of the violent act. On February 2014, Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish published their article “Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms” in the American Journal of Public Health that addresses the issue that mental illness has very little to do mass shootings which is commonly used on the aftermath of the shooting
According to the Journal of Economics there are more firearms in the United States than people. Furthermore, the majority of homicides are committed with a firearm (Levitt, 2004). This may indicate that the availability of firearms contributes to gun violence. Individuals acquire guns in a variety of ways, from inheritance, purchasing, or theft. Regardless of the means of attainment, the possession of firearms is widespread in the United States. Those who possess guns do so for many reasons such as for sport, protection, or illegal activities (Bilchik, 1999). Gun buyback programs receive weapons from all types of individuals, regardless of how they originally acquired their firearms or why.
“Guns don’t kill people, people do.” This is a well known statement that is oftentimes considered true. However, it is not completely true. Someone who is mentally ill may be unable to make logical decisions and the perception they receive of reality may be tainted by the illness. Gun laws pertaining to those suffering mental illnesses should be more restrictive. Weapons such as guns make committing an act of violence, especially when there are multiple victims, much easier. It is difficult to assess the probability of a person to commit a violent act that harms anyone including himself/herself. Therefore, gun laws need be monitored very closely and made more consistent throughout each state in order to prevent violence that could occur in the future. To make any system effective, every state must have the same laws and regulations, as it is easy for a person to travel to a state more lenient on gun control and purchase a gun from a store that will sell firearms more openly.
The Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, but only in cases of self-defense and hunting for food. However, the use of guns has drastically changed since 1791 when the amendment was implemented. Today, guns are not solely used in their intended ways. Since 2010, over eighty-seven school shootings have occurred within American grade schools, high schools, and universities, resulting in approximately 107 injuries and 109 murders of innocent students. The two most deadly shootings in the world occurred in the United States: the Virginia Tech University Massacre which left thirty-two dead and Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting which left twenty-eight dead. Each new shooting prompts a debate about gun control laws and leaves citizens wondering about the accessibility of guns; any United States citizen over the age of twenty-one that does not have any previous felonies is able to easily receive a gun license. Forty-nine out of the sixty-one school shootings that occurred between 1982 and 2012 legally obtained firearms. The statistics become even more outstanding: seventy nine percent of all shooters have been diagnosed with a mental illness or disability, including the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook shooters, Seung-Hui Cho and Adam Lanza. Cho and Lanza were diagnosed with mental illnesses and disabilities, depression and autism, respectively. Even so, they were still able to acquire the guns they needed because extensive mental health background checks did not and still do not exist; Cho purchased his own weapon and Lanza stole his mother’s guns. Although the case studies of Lanza and Cho are only two out of the many school shootings, they should be considered prime examples to illustrate the necessity to add stri...
Guns are not the trouble, people are. The United States is #1 in world gun ownership, and yet is only 28th in the world in gun murders per 100,000 people. The number of unintentional fatalities due to firearms declined by 58 percent between 1991 and 2011 Based on these facts, one can see the guns not the causes of gun violence. moreover, civilians who get permits take gun safety courses and have criminal background...
As McMahan points out, “When more citizens get guns, further problems arise: people who would have once got in a fistfight instead shoot the person who provoked them; people are shot by mistake or accident.” (McMahan, 1) One of McMahan’s premises wraps around the analogy of comparing private gun possession to the nuclear arms race. Throughout this article, McMahan shows that either everyone will have guns (criminals and private citizens), or nobody will have guns. He demonstrates that when guns are found in every household, gun control can do little to restrict access to guns from potential criminals.
People with mental issues or not mentally stable should not be able to own any kind of firearms.People that want to be eligible to own a firearm should be checked mentally and physically.There were many cases where a person that was not
Mental health is huge problem in the United States, especially when it allows certain individuals to have access to firearms. Politicians should aim to work more on keeping guns out of the hands of those who seek to harm others, not the law abiding citizens. But this is no easy task. In the CNN article, The real gun problem is mental health, not the NRA, the author, Mel Robbins, points how the mental health problem is to blame , not the gun. Robbins states "Next time there 's a mass shooting, don 't jump to blame the National Rifle Association and lax gun laws. Look first at the shooter and the mental health services he did or didn 't get, and the commitment laws in the state where the shooting took place." (Robbins) Like the first article, the author uses the ethical approach. How can we just sit by and let this keep happening? Many people seek help for mental illness and do not get the proper help that they deserve. If the proper steps were taken, some of these tragedies could have been prevented. The background check system should be a little tougher than it currently is. This is something that many law abiding gun owners agree on. Especially when it comes to the mental health part. Giving a mental health screening to somebody before getting a firearm would almost certainly help. However, no system is perfect. It would have its flaws. Not only is mental
“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The right of all Americans to bear arms is a right the Founding Fathers held to equal importance as the Constitution itself. Gun control laws directly violate this right and therefore should not even be under consideration. Even if that issue is overlooked, gun control advocates state that in order to reduce firearm related violence, gun control laws must be implemented to remove the violence caused by firearms. Although this may seem reasonable, the consequences of such laws are ironically counterproductive; they exacerbate the problem instead of fixing it. Besides the fact that the American Constitution guarantees its citizens the right to bear arms, the idea of restricting gun ownership in order to reduce firearm-related violence would ultimately fail given the previous experiments of gun control in England and in numerous states.
have shown the firearm homicide and suicide rates in the US are several times higher than that of any other industrialized country” (Towers 2). The automatic reaction people have to mass shooting is talking about gun control and mental illness policies. Every time a mass shooting occurs both the people and the government go crazy trying to find a solution yet there is no solution. The United States needs to set up mental illness awareness programs to decrease the number of mass shootings.
On December 14th, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty children, six staff members, and his own mother; this occurred because Adam Lanza was a man with a psychiatric illness with possession of many guns. If Adam Lanza did not have possession of this gun, twenty seven lives could have been saved. There are criminal background checks that take place in order to own a gun, however the government is missing one crucial aspect to it, and that is the medical background check. Even though there are laws against people with mental illnesses having guns, but the government has no way of checking if they have an illness because they do not conduct medical background checks to do so. Mass shootings by people with mental illness are a growing reoccurrence in the United States that needs to be prevented in order to save the lives of American citizens. People with psychiatric history should not be allowed to own guns because there is an increased risk of violence, people with psychiatric illness are not mentally stable, and the United States does not do proper screening and background checks for gun permits.
Gun Control laws can potentially affect violence rates in a number of ways. Guns could provide protection, put people at risk, encourage crime or even cause death. The availability of guns could could enable violent crimes or possibly help to stop them (Kleck and Paterson 2). Many criminals choose guns in violent actions over other weapons most likely due to their accessibility and long range threat. Some people believe you should control guns, while others believe there is nothing wrong.
According to “Capital Punishment, Gun Ownership, and “Homicide”, it is attempting to answer “two controversial questions, both related to the problem of interpersonal violence in America.” One of the questions asks if “the use of the death penalty exert any measurable influence on the rate of homicide in the U.S.?” and the other asks “what relationship, if any, exists between the level of gun ownership and the level of homicidal violence?” (G. Kleck, 1979)
Most shooters receive their guns illegally or have someone that will pass a background check buy it for them. People would normally use the weapons for hunting or protection from intruders. Certain people involved in politics are trying to argue that keeping a gun in the home could lead to future violence. Gun control advocates are pushing for regulations on how guns can be represented in the home.
“The more energy they have to gin up to execute their plan, the harder it will be to do so” (Newman). When “Would be shooters” are faced with a challenge they most likely don’t go through with their plan. The dedicated shooters are those who intend on finding guns and shooting people, those who have the drive. “Totally dedicated shooters” are the type of people who wont give up whether the guns are accessible to them legally or illegally. Dedicated shooters have a plan of action and intend on going through with it. These types of people likely suffer from mental illnesses. “The abnormally high level of school shootings in America is not solely a gun issue a mental health issue, or a media issue, but rather a problem caused by a combination of mental illness problems, social inequality, gun control policies, and the structure of schools”(Gupta, 2016). Structural inequalities in the United States cause stress, which lead people to turn to radical measures. Factors such as economic change, racism and social changes cause constraints on behavior. Mental health is also a leading factor to school shootings. “Metzl and MacLeish’s research shows that up to 60 percent of mass shootings in the United States since 1970 involved shooters displaying symptoms of mental illnesses—including paranoia, depression, and delusions—and the evidence suggests that