Gun Sales Case Study

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Background Checks on Private Sales Gun violence affects a tremendous amount of individuals throughout the United States. Everyday a crime is committed with the use of a gun, most of which are obtained legally. With background checks on privately sold firearms these rates would decrease, due to the fact that it would deny convicted felons, or under age people from purchasing a life threatening weapon that could be used to commit further crimes. However, it is true that sometimes background checks do not catch everything and can lead to a gun in the hands of the wrong person. For example, "Seung Hui Cho passed several background checks to purchase the guns he used to kill 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University in 2007, despite …show more content…

"Months before the attack, he tried to buy a gun in California but was denied, after a background check showed he had a documented history of mental illness. So instead Bedell decided to just go to,” neighboring Nevada, where gun laws are more lenient, and bought a 9mm handgun from a private seller who didn 't have to check out his history"(Kirkham). From this, it is evident that there is a very serious loophole in the United States gun regulations. "Nearly 40 percent of gun transactions in America occur through so-called "private party" sales, creating a secondary firearms market that is largely invisible", (Kirkham)."Fixing this would be one of the single most important things we could do to address overall gun violence," said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of criminal justice in New York (Kirkham). With this being said it is evident that the United States needs to strengthen background check laws throughout the country. If a person can just go to a different state to purchase a weapon that they were prohibited from buying in another state then what is the point of a background check at all. For the background check system to work all states need to have the same laws regarding the

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