Gun Control

Gun Control

In today’s modern society there is still a near impermeable belief among anti-gun activists that firearms are the cause of violence and crime. They believe that guns are tools of destruction and that they destroy anyone who comes into contact with them. Therefore, more guns must lead to more crime. When in fact, it is the exact opposite, more guns leads to less crime, guns do not kill people, people kill people. Firearms are just tools used by people just like knives, bats, and fists. Our right to bear arms is the only thing that keeps Americas criminals in check and apprehensive about committing a crime. Getting rid of firearms will not solve America’s problems of crime, if anything it could make it worse. To understand how a gun related crime happens, one must go inside the mind of the criminal, not the gun. The crimnal made the choice to kill, not the gun. If he or she had his mindset on killing that person, nothing will stop them, not even gun control. For them their choice of weapon is irrelevant, a knife would suit their purposes just fine. On the other hand if he or she felt like using a firearm all they have to do is make a trip to a local underground firearms dealer and buy it there. Every day there are a countless instances that show that the best deterrent of crime when it is occurring is effective self-defense and the best self-defense against a gunman has proved to be a firearm.

Unfortunately, this line of effective self-defense has been stripped from citizens in the United Kingdom when British Parliament put a ban on civilian firearms in 1998 (Slack, 2009). The new law required civilians to surrender all privately owned firearms to the police. More than 162,000 firearms and 1.5 million pounds of ammunition were surrendered on February 1998 (Slack, 2009). Accordingly, one would think with all those guns and ammunition off the streets of Brittan, the cities would be safer. Consequently no, all it did was leave England’s citizens unguarded and defenseless against gun wielding criminals, waiting to take advantage of the next civilian that could not defend themselves properly. Nonetheless, every anti-gun lobbyist and politician will still dispute to this day that the relieving of Brittan’s privately owned handguns and rifles stopped criminals from using them in the first place. On the contrary, statistics, and data gathered from the latest government figures on gun violence shows how the number of firearm offenses in England and Wales have increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 in 2008, a rise of 89% (Slack, 2009). In some parts of the country, the number of offenses has increased more than five-fold (Slack, 2009). The reality is getting rid of privately owned firearms in a country will not stop the flow of illegal weapons. Instead, it would increase because of the new black market that has manifested itself due to the depletion of weapons that can be bought with a permit