guns

The most common way for guns to hit the secondary market, pertaining to illegal guns, are thru straw purchases. A straw purchase is when a person who is legally allowed to purchase a firearm makes a legal purchase from an FFL. Next the person who has just bought the firearm will go and sell it to someone who is prohibited from legally purchasing a firearm. After the second transaction, the original owner of the gun can either neglect to report their sale of the gun or they can report the gun as stolen and not have to worry about weather or not the police find the gun.

After youths get their hands on the guns, what do they do with them? We must look at why the youths feel they need guns and what the cause of this fear or violence is. There are many different theories that try to determine why juveniles become violent. There are three major factors that come to mind when looking at juvenile violence, gangs/ gang affiliation, neighborhood factors and mental illness. These factors can affect anyone. If a youth live in bad neighborhood they might be exposed to regular violence and crime or feel the need to join a gang or possibly be born with a mental illness. If a youth lives in a nice neighborhood with no crime or gangs they still have the possibility to suffer from a mental illness.

Gangs have various reasons for having youths join them. The reason that youths tend to be a good fit for gangs is because youth are very impressionable. They are young and look up to older people, especially ones that are idolized. They are easy to train and they want to assimilate into their surroundings. Often gangs will recruit young members thru schools or parties. If a youth is invited to a party and they see the alcohol and the “glory” of th...

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...the gun laws. There should be no state that allows for possession or any person to carry a firearm without being properly trained or certified. The second thing that needs to change is gun tracking. If there is no way to track a gun and its owners then there is no way for us to prevent illegal second hand sales. If we can track the history of a gun, we can hold people liable for gun entering the hands of people who should not have them. As far as juveniles are concerned, there should be a crack down on gun safety in the home. Most juvenile’s deaths by firearms are due to suicide. The lack of safety in the home allows for easy access to guns make the process of attaining the weapon for suicide a lot easier. If there is a federal mandate that every needs to lock their guns up in a proper safe or storage device then we will cut down a majority of youths access to guns.