Why Is Gun Control Important In The United States?

Gun control is a highly debated topic in the United States. This major debate can be divided into two stances, Republican and Democratic. A big part of gun control is the second amendment. The debate on gun control has been based on the second amendment. Most Republicans favor the second amendment and against gun control. Some democrats want or are in favor of gun control and don’t agree with the second amendment.The second amendment states, “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.” In 1791, The second amendment, along with the other nine amendments were adopted. The problem that is typically faced with the second amendment today is that
The second amendment is important to our history and established what the United States is today.
The Democrats tend to lean toward pro-gun control. Supports the rights of “responsible” gun owners. Support of background checks and closing loopholes. Keeping specific weapons out of the hand of citizens. Democrats vary on the issue of gun control and have different ideas on how to resolve the issue on guns. Phoebe Maltz Bovy from New Republic proposed the solution of banning all guns. This position is a new position on gun control and would be considered far left. She explains the obvious difficulties of doing this would be that it violates civil liberties, but that there needs to be shift on gun control. The idea of this is to prevent shootings, which is the idea of gun control as well. The position held by Jill Lepore from The New Yorker is that we need gun control and she explains why. Democrats would fall under the same position as Lepore, which is the need for need for gun control. Lepore shows that facts about guns in the United States and reflects why there is a need for more gun control. She also
Gun control deals with a lot of facts and statistics. Agresti and Smith from Just Facts provides excellent facts on gun control. The first fact is crime and self defense. In 2014, there were roughly 14,249 murders and about 68% of those were with a weapon.(Agresti, Smith, 2016) This information provides a visual representation of just how many are gun related and non-gun related. A survey from the U.S. Department of Justice showed that of the 5.9 million crimes, only 10% were with a visible gun. This data shows that a small amount of crimes actually were with a gun and puts things into a different perspective. Other data shows that guns weren’t necessarily used for shooting, rather a scare tactic for felons. Agresti and Smith stated, “A 1994 survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 498,000 times per year.” This fact shows that guns aren’t always needed for its primary purpose and doesn’t hurt anyone. Guns when related to self-defense is very important and beneficial when compared to statistics. The next fact is background checks in the United States. The current federal law makes it illegal to purchase, possess, or transport firearms or ammunition if you fall under specific criteria. The criteria falls under the Gun Control Act (GCA) and it lists anyone that has been convicted for a