Guns And The Second Amendment

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There is a familiar saying that goes, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”. Punctuation before the end quote. Individuals should be able to protect themselves. Therefore, the 2nd Amendment states that we as citizens have the right to keep and bear arms, and it shall not be infringed. First and foremost, the Second Amendment was adopted into the United States Constitution on December 15, 1791. In today’s society, the Second Amendment has become a huge controversy; due to the ongoing debate over guns. However, people tend to forget that the Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The right to own a weapon is not against the law. Surprisingly, “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding”(MacBradaigh, 2013, para. 8). Restrictions on carrying guns in places like schools, courtrooms, and hospitals are more understandable. “The words of the founders make clear they believed the individual right to own firearms was very important: Thomas Jefferson said, “No free man shall be debarred the use of arms” ("NRA-ILA | The Second Amendment", 2013, para. 12). If the Founding Fathers felt the need to address this issue, why shouldn’t the general public do the same? Most importantly, the Second Amendment protects individual rights, not collective. Yet, some people claim differently. Many people believed that the Second Amendment pertained only to “rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body” (MacBradaigh, 2013, para. 2). However, the Bill of Rights was created to protect the rights of individuals, and “in America, rights by definition belong to individuals” (... ... middle of paper ... ... government to have such high-tech weapons. Equally, they wanted to be trained on how to handle guns too; so in response the Bill of Rights was created. Cases such as District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald vs. Chicago (2010), showed readers that the Second Amendment allowed people to exercise rights given to them. In both cases, each defendant stood up for the right to possess a gun. In the end, the Supreme Court ruled that owning a gun was a fundamental right already in existences. In other cases such as Shepard vs. Madigan (2011) and Moore vs. Madigan (2012), gun rights helped to play an important role in self-defense as well as other incidents. The Second Amendment allowed each individual to carry a concealed handgun in public. All in all, guns have help deter crimes. They have helped in stopping criminals and have protected the rights of gun owners.

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