Guns Control

Student’s Name

Institution

Date

Abstract

In the United States, Guns are regarded as a sacred symbol which motivated it towards achieving its independence from Great Britain. However, the increase in the latest mass shootings has led to the activation of the gun-control dispute in the United States. The main problem is gun violence which can be defined as the use of firearms to cause havoc and terror through death or harm to groups of people or an individual. Numerous lives have been lost due to gun violence thus creating national disasters in the United States. The key agenda for this issue is in the possession as well as giving out of the unlicensed guns. Therefore for the crime as resultant from gun violence to lessen, the United States administration is required to control the dissemination of guns directly.

The United States citizens are promised the rights to bear arms, and therefore the crime rates are very high in the states which have loose gun control laws like the state of Texas. This state is known to have the entire lenient gun control laws comparing to the other states in America (Spitzer, 2015). Taking guns away from individuals who are registered and approved to possess them with no criminal record is not the solution to the delinquency. This is because Americans are believed to have never reacted well factually to prohibitions. The drive of this paper is to explore the nature of gun control and the contemporary mass shootings in the United States, mainly in Texas which the leading state in gun violence.

Gun Control Issue in the United States

The term Gun control refers to any lawful measures which are envisioned to restrict or prevent the use or ownership of guns, precisely the firearms. The gun control has been a significantly discussed topic mainly in the United States especially after numerous tragic deaths besides other calamities that have happened in the past. In developed countries, for example, the United States gun control is strict besides being controversial. In other developed countries, it is a tense political concern, pitting those who regard it as essential for public protection alongside those individuals who view it as a dangerous breach of personal liberty. The United States is considered as the most controversial country in the world where gun ownership is constitutionally protected but where killings committed with guns are tremendously common; it has the highest homicide by firearm rate compared to the other developed nations so far.

There are individuals as well as civil society groups in the United States who propose limiting the access to guns as it will save many lives and decrease crime. In contrary, there are those opposing this idea claiming that it would do the opposite as it will prevent the citizens who are law-abiding from defending themselves if armed criminals attack them for example in case of robbery with violence (ProCon.org. 2018). Therefore this has resulted in heated debate among the two diverse groups of individuals. The gun control debate also necessarily concerns the proper interpretation of the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution.

There are massive mass murders which are committed with guns in the United States to the extent that the immense majority of them goes unmentioned or recognized by the mainstream media outlets all over the states. However, there are those that have happened which involved a large number of individuals, and they were quite enough to be mentioned even in the mainstream media outlets. They include the killing of forty-nine individuals in a nightclub in Orlando in 2016, besides the massacre of twenty children plus six adults in Newtown at an elementary school in 2012. This incidence sparked some outrage among the residents and thus led to short-lived as well as the fruitless debate concerning the prerequisite for firmer gun control.

According to Hamilton and Kposowa (2015), in the United States, per one hundred individuals, one hundred individuals have guns, or generally, the United States has around 398,347,000 guns and is considered as the uppermost total as well as per capita figure globally. This is to say that 22 percent of Americans possess either one or more guns. The percent of gun ownership of men is 35 percent while that of women is 12 percent.

Guns in Colonial and Radical America

During the American colonies the guns were ubiquitous, firstly, they were used for hunting as well as general defense and afterward as weapons in the American Revolutionary War. There were numerous colonies gun laws which entailed the head of households possess guns and moreover that all the healthy men join the militia plus carry individual weapons. Though guns were commonly used in the colonial plus revolutionary America, there were also some restrictions regarding their usage as well as possession. The laws comprised of prohibiting the auction of firearms to Native Americans, forbidding indentured servants as well as the slaves from possessing guns and finally prohibiting a diversity of careers from retaining firearms.

A 1792 federal Act entailed that each suitable for joining the militia activities was obliged to possess a gun, report for regular assessment of their firearms and also register their firearm’s proprietorship on community records (Hamilton & Kposowa 2015, p.87). Most of the Americans possessed hunting rifles instead of appropriate soldierly firearms, and though the punishment penalties were huge, they were imposed incoherently and thus the public essentially ignored the law.

The 1900s, Federal Gun Acts

The St. Valentine’s Day killings which happened in February 1945 in Chicago during Valentine’s Day celebrations, led to the murder of seven gangsters who were associated with “Bugs” Moran. This resulted in a sequence of debates as well as laws to bar the use of machine guns. In reaction to the mafia criminalities, the National Firearms Act was enacted in 1934 which imposes a two hundred dollars tax as well as registration prerequisite on the manufacture and distribution of certain guns, comprising the rifles as well as the shotguns containing of barrels smaller than eighteen inches, silencers, firearm mufflers and specific firearms shortlisted by the NFA. The majority of weapons are therefore omitted from the Act (Skocpol 2016, p.432).

The 1938 Federal Firearms Act of 1938 pronounced it illegal the selling of firearms to a particular group of individuals, and it needed the federal firearms licensees (FFLs) to preserve client records. However, this Act was overthrown by the 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA). On October 1968, President Lyndon Johnson put the Gun Control Act of 1968 into the act after the murder of President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King in 1968 all who were prominent individuals during that period in the American history (Kleck, 2017). This Act which was introduced controls interstate gun trade by barring federal transfer lest completed among licensed manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and restricts the ownership of guns.

On November 1993 an Act known as Brady Act was signed into law whereby it required to wait five days for a certified vendor to give over the gun to an individual who is not licensed in the states which lacked another background check method. Presently, the five-day duration of waiting has subsequently been substituted by an immediate background check method which takes like three days if there exists some inconsistency. The gun holders who possess a federal weapons authorization or a state-issued authority are exempted from this process.

Federal plus State Gun Laws in the 2000s

In the 2000s, several Acts for controlling guns and other firearms have been initiated. An example was in January 2016 when President Obama declared new exclusive measure on gun control. His actions started immediately, and some of them comprised: addition of two hundred ATF agents, the expansion plus update of the background checks, a new necessity to report gun thefts and amplified mental health care funding (Skocpol 2016, p.434). According to federal gun acts, each state possesses its specific set of gun rules extending from Texas to California which has the greatest restricting gun laws in the United States.

Gun control in the state of Texas

In the past two years, the public concern concerning gun control has grown in Texas and this characterized by the continuous violence instigated by the Mexican drug lords and cartels on the Texas and Mexico border. When the issue of gun control arises, the individuals in Texas exhibits diverse beliefs. There are those individuals who believe that gun control laws are operative in decreasing criminality, those that think that these laws are ineffectual against crime, and those who think that individual ownership of guns crime reduces crime (Spitzer, 2015). The problem of gun violence is high, and with harsh gun control laws pending, the residents of Texas are much concerned about their safety.

A particular survey which was conducted in 2010 by the Census Bureau exposed that Texas, which comprised a populace of 25,145,561 individuals, 22,239,258 of the total populated owned guns (Rossi, 2017). This exhibited a gun ownership rate that was represented the second highest number of the individuals who possessed guns among the fifty states of the United States of America. While examining the gun control Acts in Texas, it is significant to evaluate these Acts from the viewpoints of laws that typically boost the ownership of guns plus the Acts that control their use. Presently, Texas is among the numerous states that have approved a code referred as Stand Your Ground Law that is related with a substantial upsurge in the number of killings. Consequently, there are some Texas laws which are intended at regulating the use of firearms and they comprise of Civil Practice plus Remedies Code and the Texas Penal Code. The Texas Open Carry Gun Law took commenced in January 2016, and it consents the approved gun possessors to openly carry handguns in public places as well as in holsters (Rossi, 2017). It is vital to note that the Texas Second Amendment Preservation Act invalidates the implementation of national gun control Acts in the state regarding the recent push for gun control at the national level. This act exempts the Texas state from the application of federal regulations that typically overstep on the privilege of law-abiding residents to retain guns.

The Present Gun Control Dispute

Generally, the recent public gun control dispute in the United States typically transpires when a significant mass killing occurs. Between January 2000 and July 2014, there were about 126 mass shooting. The advocates of extra gun control habitually need more strict laws to be introduced to curb the mass shooting and also demand for proper background checks and smart gun laws. Contrary to the opponents accuse the proponents of applying a strategy arguing that enactment of additional laws would not have stopped the shootings (ProCon.org, 2018). The Pew Research Survey which was conducted in 2014, showed that 52 percent of Americans believe for the protection of the right to possess guns whereas 46 percent think that gun possessions need to be regulated. A recent poll which was conducted on February 14 by the Quinnipiac Poll agency after the mass shooting at Douglass High school in Florida showed that 66 percent of American electorates are in support of sterner gun control laws.

Conclusion

As seen in the above discussion it is evident that gun control is a vastly disputed subject in the United States as it is not a newly researched matter. Over the past thirty years, several research studies have addressed some attitudes regarding gun control in numerous ways. These studies have examined the resultant causes of increased gun violations are a result of political ideology, racial beliefs, race and the effects of some gun control legislation which were enacted in the initial 1990s. Moreover as elaborated above there exists a different group of individuals who differ regarding the issue of gun control as there are those supporting the implementation of stricter laws to limit the incidences of mass shootings. Accordingly, some opponents dislike the ideas of the opponents, and they also have their underlying reason, for example, the self-protection strategy. Therefore, this poses a stiffer debate on the issue of gun control among the two groups. However, there is a need for proper and firmer laws to be enacted to decrease the increased mass shooting incidences.

References

Hamilton, D., & Kposowa, A. J. (2015). Firearms and violent death in the United States: Gun ownership, gun control, and mortality rates in 16 states, 2005–2009. British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, 7, 84-98.

Kleck, G. (2017). Targeting guns: Firearms and their control. Routledge.

ProCon.org. (2018, June 29). Background of the Issue. Retrieved from http://gun-control.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=006436Rossi, P. H. (2017). Armed and considered dangerous: A survey of felons and their firearms. Routledge.

Skocpol, T. (2016). Introduction. PS: Political Science & Politics, 49(3), 433-436.

Spitzer, R. J. (2015). Politics of gun control. Routledge.

Guns Control

Student’s Name

Institution

Date

Abstract

In the United States, Guns are regarded as a sacred symbol which motivated it towards achieving its independence from Great Britain. However, the increase in the latest mass shootings has led to the activation of the gun-control dispute in the United States. The main problem is gun violence which can be defined as the use of firearms to cause havoc and terror through death or harm to groups of people or an individual. Numerous lives have been lost due to gun violence thus creating national disasters in the United States. The key agenda for this issue is in the possession as well as giving out of the unlicensed guns. Therefore for the crime as resultant from gun violence to lessen, the United States administration is required to control the dissemination of guns directly.

The United States citizens are promised the rights to bear arms, and therefore the crime rates are very high in the states which have loose gun control laws like the state of Texas. This state is known to have the entire lenient gun control laws comparing to the other states in America (Spitzer, 2015). Taking guns away from individuals who are registered and approved to possess them with no criminal record is not the solution to the delinquency. This is because Americans are believed to have never reacted well factually to prohibitions. The drive of this paper is to explore the nature of gun control and the contemporary mass shootings in the United States, mainly in Texas which the leading state in gun violence.

Gun Control Issue in the United States

The term Gun control refers to any lawful measures which are envisioned to restrict or prevent the use or ownership of guns, precisely the firearms. The gun control has been a significantly discussed topic mainly in the United States especially after numerous tragic deaths besides other calamities that have happened in the past. In developed countries, for example, the United States gun control is strict besides being controversial. In other developed countries, it is a tense political concern, pitting those who regard it as essential for public protection alongside those individuals who view it as a dangerous breach of personal liberty. The United States is considered as the most controversial country in the world where gun ownership is constitutionally protected but where killings committed with guns are tremendously common; it has the highest homicide by firearm rate compared to the other developed nations so far.

There are individuals as well as civil society groups in the United States who propose limiting the access to guns as it will save many lives and decrease crime. In contrary, there are those opposing this idea claiming that it would do the opposite as it will prevent the citizens who are law-abiding from defending themselves if armed criminals attack them for example in case of robbery with violence (ProCon.org. 2018). Therefore this has resulted in heated debate among the two diverse groups of individuals. The gun control debate also necessarily concerns the proper interpretation of the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution.

There are massive mass murders which are committed with guns in the United States to the extent that the immense majority of them goes unmentioned or recognized by the mainstream media outlets all over the states. However, there are those that have happened which involved a large number of individuals, and they were quite enough to be mentioned even in the mainstream media outlets. They include the killing of forty-nine individuals in a nightclub in Orlando in 2016, besides the massacre of twenty children plus six adults in Newtown at an elementary school in 2012. This incidence sparked some outrage among the residents and thus led to short-lived as well as the fruitless debate concerning the prerequisite for firmer gun control.

According to Hamilton and Kposowa (2015), in the United States, per one hundred individuals, one hundred individuals have guns, or generally, the United States has around 398,347,000 guns and is considered as the uppermost total as well as per capita figure globally. This is to say that 22 percent of Americans possess either one or more guns. The percent of gun ownership of men is 35 percent while that of women is 12 percent.

Guns in Colonial and Radical America

During the American colonies the guns were ubiquitous, firstly, they were used for hunting as well as general defense and afterward as weapons in the American Revolutionary War. There were numerous colonies gun laws which entailed the head of households possess guns and moreover that all the healthy men join the militia plus carry individual weapons. Though guns were commonly used in the colonial plus revolutionary America, there were also some restrictions regarding their usage as well as possession. The laws comprised of prohibiting the auction of firearms to Native Americans, forbidding indentured servants as well as the slaves from possessing guns and finally prohibiting a diversity of careers from retaining firearms.

A 1792 federal Act entailed that each suitable for joining the militia activities was obliged to possess a gun, report for regular assessment of their firearms and also register their firearm’s proprietorship on community records (Hamilton & Kposowa 2015, p.87). Most of the Americans possessed hunting rifles instead of appropriate soldierly firearms, and though the punishment penalties were huge, they were imposed incoherently and thus the public essentially ignored the law.

The 1900s, Federal Gun Acts

The St. Valentine’s Day killings which happened in February 1945 in Chicago during Valentine’s Day celebrations, led to the murder of seven gangsters who were associated with “Bugs” Moran. This resulted in a sequence of debates as well as laws to bar the use of machine guns. In reaction to the mafia criminalities, the National Firearms Act was enacted in 1934 which imposes a two hundred dollars tax as well as registration prerequisite on the manufacture and distribution of certain guns, comprising the rifles as well as the shotguns containing of barrels smaller than eighteen inches, silencers, firearm mufflers and specific firearms shortlisted by the NFA. The majority of weapons are therefore omitted from the Act (Skocpol 2016, p.432).

The 1938 Federal Firearms Act of 1938 pronounced it illegal the selling of firearms to a particular group of individuals, and it needed the federal firearms licensees (FFLs) to preserve client records. However, this Act was overthrown by the 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA). On October 1968, President Lyndon Johnson put the Gun Control Act of 1968 into the act after the murder of President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King in 1968 all who were prominent individuals during that period in the American history (Kleck, 2017). This Act which was introduced controls interstate gun trade by barring federal transfer lest completed among licensed manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and restricts the ownership of guns.

On November 1993 an Act known as Brady Act was signed into law whereby it required to wait five days for a certified vendor to give over the gun to an individual who is not licensed in the states which lacked another background check method. Presently, the five-day duration of waiting has subsequently been substituted by an immediate background check method which takes like three days if there exists some inconsistency. The gun holders who possess a federal weapons authorization or a state-issued authority are exempted from this process.

Federal plus State Gun Laws in the 2000s

In the 2000s, several Acts for controlling guns and other firearms have been initiated. An example was in January 2016 when President Obama declared new exclusive measure on gun control. His actions started immediately, and some of them comprised: addition of two hundred ATF agents, the expansion plus update of the background checks, a new necessity to report gun thefts and amplified mental health care funding (Skocpol 2016, p.434). According to federal gun acts, each state possesses its specific set of gun rules extending from Texas to California which has the greatest restricting gun laws in the United States.

Gun control in the state of Texas

In the past two years, the public concern concerning gun control has grown in Texas and this characterized by the continuous violence instigated by the Mexican drug lords and cartels on the Texas and Mexico border. When the issue of gun control arises, the individuals in Texas exhibits diverse beliefs. There are those individuals who believe that gun control laws are operative in decreasing criminality, those that think that these laws are ineffectual against crime, and those who think that individual ownership of guns crime reduces crime (Spitzer, 2015). The problem of gun violence is high, and with harsh gun control laws pending, the residents of Texas are much concerned about their safety.

A particular survey which was conducted in 2010 by the Census Bureau exposed that Texas, which comprised a populace of 25,145,561 individuals, 22,239,258 of the total populated owned guns (Rossi, 2017). This exhibited a gun ownership rate that was represented the second highest number of the individuals who possessed guns among the fifty states of the United States of America. While examining the gun control Acts in Texas, it is significant to evaluate these Acts from the viewpoints of laws that typically boost the ownership of guns plus the Acts that control their use. Presently, Texas is among the numerous states that have approved a code referred as Stand Your Ground Law that is related with a substantial upsurge in the number of killings. Consequently, there are some Texas laws which are intended at regulating the use of firearms and they comprise of Civil Practice plus Remedies Code and the Texas Penal Code. The Texas Open Carry Gun Law took commenced in January 2016, and it consents the approved gun possessors to openly carry handguns in public places as well as in holsters (Rossi, 2017). It is vital to note that the Texas Second Amendment Preservation Act invalidates the implementation of national gun control Acts in the state regarding the recent push for gun control at the national level. This act exempts the Texas state from the application of federal regulations that typically overstep on the privilege of law-abiding residents to retain guns.

The Present Gun Control Dispute

Generally, the recent public gun control dispute in the United States typically transpires when a significant mass killing occurs. Between January 2000 and July 2014, there were about 126 mass shooting. The advocates of extra gun control habitually need more strict laws to be introduced to curb the mass shooting and also demand for proper background checks and smart gun laws. Contrary to the opponents accuse the proponents of applying a strategy arguing that enactment of additional laws would not have stopped the shootings (ProCon.org, 2018). The Pew Research Survey which was conducted in 2014, showed that 52 percent of Americans believe for the protection of the right to possess guns whereas 46 percent think that gun possessions need to be regulated. A recent poll which was conducted on February 14 by the Quinnipiac Poll agency after the mass shooting at Douglass High school in Florida showed that 66 percent of American electorates are in support of sterner gun control laws.

Conclusion

As seen in the above discussion it is evident that gun control is a vastly disputed subject in the United States as it is not a newly researched matter. Over the past thirty years, several research studies have addressed some attitudes regarding gun control in numerous ways. These studies have examined the resultant causes of increased gun violations are a result of political ideology, racial beliefs, race and the effects of some gun control legislation which were enacted in the initial 1990s. Moreover as elaborated above there exists a different group of individuals who differ regarding the issue of gun control as there are those supporting the implementation of stricter laws to limit the incidences of mass shootings. Accordingly, some opponents dislike the ideas of the opponents, and they also have their underlying reason, for example, the self-protection strategy. Therefore, this poses a stiffer debate on the issue of gun control among the two groups. However, there is a need for proper and firmer laws to be enacted to decrease the increased mass shooting incidences.

References

Hamilton, D., & Kposowa, A. J. (2015). Firearms and violent death in the United States: Gun ownership, gun control, and mortality rates in 16 states, 2005–2009. British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, 7, 84-98.

Kleck, G. (2017). Targeting guns: Firearms and their control. Routledge.

ProCon.org. (2018, June 29). Background of the Issue. Retrieved from http://gun-control.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=006436Rossi, P. H. (2017). Armed and considered dangerous: A survey of felons and their firearms. Routledge.

Skocpol, T. (2016). Introduction. PS: Political Science & Politics, 49(3), 433-436.

Spitzer, R. J. (2015). Politics of gun control. Routledge.