Gun Control

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Gun Control

Statistics on an issue such as gun control are not hard to come by. The numbers seem to sway in the favor of gun control being ineffective against the epidemic of gun violence that is facing this nation today. There is evidence to support that many guns used for illegal activities are obtained by illegal means anyway, making laws to restrict the purchase of said guns ineffective at keeping firearms out of criminals hands. Evidence also supports the statements that guns are used in defense more often than not, that the age old statistic that “13” children die each day by guns is inaccurate, and that there are numbers that show the direct relationship between the loosening of gun laws and the lowering of the crime rate.

-Crime victims are more than twice as likely to walk away from an assailant unharmed if they use a gun in self defense (source 5)

-Women are 2.5 times less likely to be seriously injured if they resist attack with guns than if they do not resist (source 3)

-Potential victims use guns more than 2 million times a year to stop violent crimes (crimes are stopped by defensive use of guns more than five times as frequently as crimes are committed with guns) (source 2)

- Eighty-eight percent of violent crimes do not involve firearms. (Source 6)

-Most people that die looking down the barrel of a gun are killed by themselves, not by criminals (source 5)

-It is widespread that 13 children die per day from guns when the figure is closer to 1.9 children per day (source 2)

-Accidental deaths, though rumored to be frequent, are in actuality quite rare. 138 children under the age of 15 died from accidental gun deaths in 1996. (However, when you consider the fact that 80 million people own 240 million gun...

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...ished to purchase a gun would have to go to a special half-day class for ex-cons wishing to purchase weapons.

The likelihood of implementation for this proposed solution would be great. It would somewhat resemble the process for getting a permit to drive, and implementing that is not a problem. The cost? That’s another story. The class would most likely have to cost money, since the chance of the government coughing up money for a program like this that doesn’t help the masses in some way or another is slim to none. This would be, I believe, a successful alternative to constrictive gun control laws. The certificate would ensure that before a person be allowed to own their own gun the following would occur: they would be exposed to guns, learn basic laws about guns, and also learn simple safety features, also their rights and responsibilities as gun-owning citizens.

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