Gun Violence In America Research Paper

America needs to tighten their gun control. Not that they need to ban guns from the nation, they just need to make the guns harder to obtain. Gun violence has been a problem in the United States for a while now and the accessibility that citizens have to guns are endless. It has gotten to the point where even Wal-Marts are selling guns. Reducing gun use would decrease deaths, mass murders, and increase background checks on the people checking out or buying guns. These are some of the few problems we are facing now. There has to be restrictions put onto these killing machines. In the United States guns have played a large role in death since the 14th century, when they were first introduced to America (“Gun Timeline”). Recently there

Many citizens own firearms and pose no threat to public safety but when individuals with a history of violence or serious mental illnesses access guns because of the weak gun laws lethal violence increases. People with mental illnesses are not direct targets either because they are also human beings with certain unalienable rights. Most “Americans who struggle with mental health are undiagnosed” and putting them on the spot isn’t going to help them get the help they might need in the future (Marcotte, sec. 3). On the other hand, violent and mentally ill people have killed many people including the lives of innocent children. Lives have been taken at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, California. As hard as this may be, I don’t know if we should be accusing the shooters for the killings. If there were stricter laws enacted there probably wouldn’t be this mass shooter problem, we wouldn’t have to worry about so many lives lost, burials, shootings, or people with PTSD (post traumatic

5). Americans have the need to carry around guns to “protect” themselves, for hunting or for shooting ranges and that causes guns to fall into the wrong hands. Most Americans would argue that it is their Second Amendment right to be able to possess a gun. Americans have the right to protect themselves but John Paul Stevens had something else to add about that commentary. John Paul Stevens is a former member of the U.S. Supreme Court and he stated, “the Supreme Court didn’t say exactly what the Second Amendment means” which is that it only “applied to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes”(qtd. in Barrett, para. 3). When it was first adopted in 1791, the general public made up the militia to which the amendment refers. Linda Hasselstrom, a highly respected poet and essayist, has considered herself a peace-loving woman but still decides to carry around a pistol. She made the decision to carry a pistol due to events that happened to her in the past ten years. These events went from harassments to moments she believed she could have died. Hasselstrom stated in the “Background of Sexual Assault” that in a 2009 study conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation gun purchases by women were increasing and 80% of the women who purchased had done a survey saying the gun was for self-defense (272). The