While it is true that guns are involved in thousands of deaths per year in the United States, there are things that lead to far more deaths than guns. According to Levitt, in 2009, 45,000 people died in autmobile related accidents and only 30,000 died in gun related incidents (151). Using the logic of those against gun rights, it’s the car’s fault not the driver’s fault that 45,000 people die every year. This is just an irrational attempt to shift reponsibility off of the people that actually cause these incidents. Another example that shows that guns aren’t so dangerous is that in any given year there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools as compared to 1 death for every 1 million guns, or 175 children killed for the over 200 million guns owned in the U.S. (Levitt 150).
Some of those reasons being the crime rates, the costs of what could happen, and injuries. Firearm injuries have killed more than 28,000 Americans each year since 1972 (Ruben). In 2007, thirty-one thousand two hundred twenty four Americans died due to homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings. Accidental shootings happen quite often. In 2007, around seventy thousand Americans were hospitalized due to accidental shootings.
Of those 420,000 assault rifles only 40 murders with firearms were committed in the entire country. (Police Statistics on Crime Annual Report 2010). This suggests that a country’s almost non existent gun restriction has no influence over murders by assault rifles. Also with the knowledge that most every house and apartment has an assault rifle in the house, it would make a thief or any wrong doer think twice about robbing or harming anyone inside the
On November 30, 2001, he was arrested for the murders of four women whose cases were linked to him through DNA evidence. In November of 2003 he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated murder, although he says he actually killed 90 women or more, almost all prostitutes. The murders occurred in the early 1980s. As part of a plea bargain, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without
and Robert Kennedy the 1960’s were two foundational instances when the government knew they had to act and strengthen gun control laws. Gun control laws have always been an issue for every state. One of the biggest issues is that we don’t have enough people that are willing to speak up for stricter gun control laws. According to an Associated Press poll in December, “only half of Americans thought that gun laws should be stricter and 15% actually said they should be less strict.” I think we can all agree that gun control laws should be stricter. There are people who are mentally ill that are able to purchase guns with the intent of killing people.
Lethal Injection For thousands of years, many governments have punished people convicted of certain crimes by putting them to death, using various means to accomplish this. The death penalty is considered by many to be the ultimate form of punishment for those who have committed society's most heinous crimes, including rape and murder. As times have changed, so have the methods of execution. The idea of someone being put to death is not a pleasant one. About 74 of the world's countries and 38 American states have a death penalty (although the vast majority of executions in 2004 took place in China, Iran, Vietnam and the United States), so this unpleasant topic is bound to come up.
This is assuming that the criminal who is breaking countless laws as it is has decided to abide by the gun control law. If he/she has not, the offender now has even more of an upper hand. This being said, it is easy to argue that a law banning civilians from owning guns would actually increase crimes. A great example of this is England. The two years following the 1997 draconian gun ban, crime rose by 40% according to BBC
The Need for Stricter Gun Control Laws Nine thousand, four hundred, and eighty four (9,484) people died in handgun incidents in the United States during 2008. This number is drastically higher than gun related deaths in foreign countries such as Germany with two hundred and sixty nine (269), the United Kingdom had just fourteen (14), and Australia had only fifty nine (59). The reason for such a drastic difference in these numbers is because Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia have stricter gun control laws as well as requiring gun safety courses. These laws directly affect the number of deaths related to the misuse of handguns each year. If the United States chooses to adopt some of those foreign laws and regulations the
While most people would by a gun for conventional purposes such as self-defense, hunting, or target shooting, it is inevitable that there will be people who buy a gun in order to use it for robbery, murder, rape, or a number of other heinous crimes, but depriving those who would use their firearm without malicious intent of their second amendment right does not rectify this horrible fact. The issue of gun control is not solely found in the United States, there are many other countries that have taken to banning weapons in an attempt to reduce their homicide rates. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Belarus, Luxemburg and Russia all had handgun bans, ironically enough these countries had on average 10 times the murder rate than that of their neighboring countries which did not have a
“The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimates that there are more than 215 million guns in the hands of private citizens. That's a gun for almost every man, woman and child in our country” (Mackin, 1). The fact that there are just about as many guns as there are people in the United States makes you wonder what kind of impression our society is giving the youth of the future. The problem isn’t always as bad as it seems sometimes the negative affects of the media will be a lesser violent act, but that’s exactly my point. What starts as one small act of violence maybe as a kid hitting another child