Sandy Hook Shooting Essay

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, to which everyone can recall, and to whom it may concern, regardless of their politics and feelings about guns, this was a horrible, unthinkable tragedy. Yet, in the days that followed, Americans found themselves bitterly divided around the issue of gun control. Proponents of gun control argued that we need tighter control over who can buy guns and other weapons, that some weapons should only be in the hands of law enforcement and military personnel, and that the proliferation of guns on our streets had made America unsafe. They signed petitions, called for gun control legislation, and pointed out that Sandy Hook was just one in a very long line of massacres that occurred when guns were turned on innocent people.
Opponents of gun control felt threatened by this, and argued that their 2nd Amendment right to bear arms was vulnerable, and that gun control would leave them defenseless against a oppressive government trying to impose its will. As the federal government held hearings on gun control, the gun lobby argued that if tighter control were placed on guns, criminals would have guns, but law-abiding citizens would not. Opponents of gun control viewed training and arming teachers and having armed guards in schools as the solution to the school shooting problem.
What did the two sides agree on? Little, other than that our society needed better mental health care and screening in order to prevent similar tragedies in the future. They disagreed, however, on who would provide these mental health services and who would pay for them, so even this issue was argumentative. If we step back from the argument for a moment and view the conflict over gun control through sociological perspecti...

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...ms? What does it mean to bear them? At least with the first amendment we know exactly where we stand: Freedom of speech. It couldn’t be any clearer. But, the right to bear arms leaves the second amendment open to different interpretations. We need gun permits to carry a concealed weapon. Do we need knife permits? No. Yet both can, and often do, cause death. We can own a gun, or a rifle, or a sub-machine gun, or a machete, and dozens of other tools to kill, even our own bare hands. So, gun control is a debate in our country that makes no sense unless you broaden the ban or acceptance to include all objects that could cause harm or death, which in the end would be nearly impossible to do. Do we want to end up being a jail on the outside too? We can’t control other people’s mental process, only that person can control what they want to do or are intending to act upon.