Gun Violence: The Problem is the Law

Gun violence has reached epidemic levels this past decade in the United States of America. Countless people’s lives get cut short simply because people are able to kill each other, and they don’t think twice. The problem is not that people are overly violent! It is that guns are easy to kill with, and even worse, they are easy to obtain. Every day throughout the world, weapons are sold to civilians for increasingly invalid reasons. There is no way to justify that a civilian really needs a sub-machine gun, an extremely dangerous contraption. They fire multiple bullets within seconds, and are intended to hurt whatever they’re aimed for. Any average person can operate them, and for the most part, people don’t use them to protect themselves and their families.
The struggle over gun laws has been going on for what seems like forever. It is a constant uphill battle for those trying to increase gun control in this country. This is because of the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees a right to bear arms for all its citizens. People need to realize that this law was added in a time when cities relied on militia for security, and guns were purely used to protect property and family from legitimate threats. Mathew Yeager believes that people should not think of guns as a form of protecting, saying in his essay How Well does the Handgun Protect You and Your Family, that “the probability of being robber, rapped and assaulted is low enough to seriously call into question the need for Americans to keep loaded guns on theirs or about their homes.” (214)
There are some people out there who realize how ridiculous the current gun ‘control’ laws are. There is a struggle going on in Philadelphia between the city and the Supreme Court. The Mayor of the city believes he can reduce the amount of gun fatalities by making it much harder for one to qualify for a weapons permit. The lawmakers in Philadelphia have been fighting for these changes for many years now, but in 1996 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a city could not enforce its own gun laws. Of course, this ruling hasn’t discouraged the Mayor from his arguments for stricter gun control. He has stated "If you believe we can have a safer city by putting these measures in place, I think as good public servants we are compelled to take some type of action in the face of no relief coming from anywhere else.” (PhiladelphiaInquirer.com) Philadelphia’s efforts on gun control were pale in comparison to those of Washington DC.
Washington D.C., since it is not a state, therefore does not have to follow the previously mentioned court ruling on individual state gun control, and has been recently making headline news regarding gun control. The law passed in 1976 bans the private possession of handguns. Their ban on all handguns was overturned, after a federal appeals court ruled that this law was in conflict with the second amendment. Said Attorney General Linda Singer "Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees, it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die." (WashingtonPost.com). The ban in D.C. was initially challenged by a security guard, Dick Anthony Heller. He argued that the law wasn’t keeping criminals from obtaining weapons, but was instead keeping law abiding citizens like himself from having protection for themselves and their families. The Mayor of D.C. Adrian M. Fenty said of the decision to overturn the handgun ban, “I am personally deeply disappointed and frankly outraged by this decision. It flies in the face of laws that have helped decrease gun violence in the District of Columbia” (washingtonpost.com). The D.C. court of appeals was the first federal appeals court to overturn a gun control law. (washingtonpost.com)
Both Philadelphia and Washington D.C are putting in valiant efforts to lessen the gun violence that is plaguing our country, but it’s high time to get more serious. Even with a complete handgun ban in D.C., 134 of the 169 homicides were committed with handguns, showing that it’s time in turn up the heat on gun control. The only way to get people to stop carrying guns is to make the penalty for being caught with one so severe, that no one would dare to take the risk. This might seem to be a fairly extreme strategy, but we are at a point in this country that nothing else seems to be working.
Gun companies’ multi-billion dollar industry is supported by many politicians and law-makers. This is a problem when new laws are trying to be passed, because the people involved in the decision-making have a personal investment in these laws not passing. They should spend time listening to people who argue against public access to guns, instead of following outdated opinion. It is sad that in this day in age, the gun companies have enough money and power to influence the decision that the politicians are making.
People say that they need guns for their protection, but how many times have guns been brought into homes and used against the owners, accidentally been shot off, or even stolen? These issues are barely ever spoken of, despite their obvious importance. In 2002 there were 3,012 children and teens that were killed by firearms, and every year 4 to 5 times that number of people are injured in a non-fatal incident (NEA Health Information Network). How can you argue that guns are protecting us, when it is clear that all they do is harm us? Statistics say that four people every hour are killed in the United States by firearms. Guns are getting into the wrong hands, and too many people are dying. Robert F Drinan saying in his Essay Good Outweighs the Evil, that “the defense value of owning a gun is far outweighed by the frequency with which the weapon is, accidentally or otherwise, turned against its owner, his family, or his friends.”(55)
There are those who believe that cracking down on the gun control laws will not be enough to reduce the violence problem in the United States. The common slogan “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” embodies the logic behind their argument, so they maintain that people would kill each other regardless of possessing guns. This is simply not true! By using a gun, you remove some the human aspect of committing murder, because it so easy to do. Only with a gun are you able to kill someone from a distance without ever have to come into contact with them. And once you remove the human contact people can kills other without regard for the life of the individual that they are taking.
There is not a clear-cut solution to solve the problem of gun violence in the United States. Because there is so many guns already out in the streets that even if they stopped production of handguns there is enough out there on the black market to keep the criminal who want to obtain a gun supplied. The first step toward control of firearms is to follow in the footsteps of Washington D.C. and make handguns illegal to own. We have a long way to come in this struggle to keep guns off the streets and out of the houses, but each time someone challenges the law we come closer to reaching the final goal. As new cases make the news more people start to realize how much of a problem guns actually are. If everyone were aware of the damages guns were causing they would be more willing to give up their civil liberties in order to live in a safer country.