Gun Control in the USA

Gun control efforts generally focus on passing legislation—by local, state, or national government—to restrict legal ownership of certain firearms, the aim being to reduce violence caused by use of guns. In the United States, the federal government and all states have laws regulating the ownership and use of firearms. (Encyclopedia Encarta, 2001) However, gun control laws are controversial because many people believe they infringe on the constitutional right to bear arms. Some people argue that proposed gun control laws would actually benefit criminals, providing them with an unarmed populace to prey upon. Others say that the death rate from accidental gunshot wounds is rising and call for a near-total ban on handguns and assault weapons. The purpose of this research is to present the arguments for and against gun control in the USA.
The federal government and all U.S. states have some gun control laws. These laws are based on several strategies: 1) forbidding certain types of people from obtaining any firearms; 2) prohibiting anyone other than the police, the military, and persons with special needs from acquiring certain types of guns; 3) and requiring purchasers to wait some period of time before purchasing a gun or gun license.
The most common gun control strategy attempts to prohibit unreliable people from obtaining guns. Federal and state laws prohibit people who have been convicted of a felony and other individuals deemed to be risks (such as those with mental illness or a history of domestic violence) from purchasing guns. Federal law and many state laws also prohibit minors from obtaining guns.
Proponents of strict gun control laws argue that reducing the number of crimes committed with guns would save lives. Each year in the United States more than 35,000 people are killed by guns, a death rate much higher than that in any other industrial nation. Attacks involving a gun are five times more likely to result in a death than are similar attacks made with a knife. In 1997 guns were the weapons used in approximately 70 percent of the murders in the United States. (Encyclopedia Encarta, 2001)
“Isn't it obvious that America has strayed terribly far of course, that the gun violence now poisoning our society is nothing less than a threat to our national [the USA] security and collective sanity? Isn't it obvious that America has lost more than its innocence when children can't go to school without being shot at, when domestic quarrels increasingly end in deadly gunfire, when young thugs roam the streets more heavily armed than the police, when the mentally disturbed can vent their frustrations in a crowded town square or office building with an automatic weapon?” - The Los Angeles Times.
The only way to end the killing and maiming, he claims, is to impose a near-total ban on the manufacture, sale and private possession of handguns and assault weapons—in effect to restrict their possession to law enforcement officers. To this end, national policy must work to encourage Americans to turn over their handguns and assault weapons voluntarily to the authorities, as a demonstration of how serious this nation is about dealing with the problem.
Even if all gun manufacturing and sales ceased now, about 200 million guns would remain in circulation—nearly one gun for every man, woman and child in this country. These instruments of death are put on night tables, in purses, closets, and glove compartments. But that's not where they remain. Guns purchased by law-abiding adults for 'protection' increasingly end up in the backpacks of schoolchildren and the pockets of small-time drug dealers and robbers, gang members and professional thugs. There were more than 15,300 gun homicides nationwide last year, up from more than 14,200 in 1991. Over the last 25 years, more Americans have died in gun-related murders than were killed in the Vietnam War, the Korean War and World War I combined. (Unknown, 1993, The Los Angeles Times)
However, many Americans vigorously and righteously disagree. Some contend that there's absolutely nothing wrong with gun ownership and indeed that Americans must retain their relatively easy access to guns in order to protect themselves and their families. Many others believe that far less comprehensive measures would sharply reduce the rate of gun violence, measures such as stiffer penalties for gun-related crimes and better enforcement of the existing gun licensing laws. Without tough and nearly comprehensive national restrictions on manufacture, sale and ownership, the slaughter will continue. (Unknown, 1993, The Los Angeles Times).
However, while gun control laws may decrease criminals' access to guns, the same laws restrict law-abiding citizens. About half of all U.S. families own at least one gun. The most frequent motives for gun ownership are protecting the home, hunting or target shooting, and collecting. Gun control laws aim to reduce the criminal use of guns as much as possible while not putting large burdens on legitimate gun users.
Opponents of gun control laws object to the inconvenience these laws may cause to law-abiding gun buyers or owners. Another objection to gun control laws concerns the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Which states: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” (Text of American Constitution”) Those who oppose restrictions on gun ownership find support in the language of the Second Amendment and believe that it should be interpreted to guarantee citizens free access to firearms.
Firearms are used to commit as many as 650,000 crimes each year. But firearms are also used to prevent crimes as many as one million times each year. In fact, criminals are three times more likely to be killed by armed victims who resist them than by the police. “A careful review of 18 academic studies shows that there is no relationship between the number of guns and the amount of crime in the United States. International evidence tells a similar story. Guns are of big help in defending against criminals. Each year, potential victims kill from 2,000 to 3,000 criminals and wound an additional 9,000 to 17,000. And mishaps are rare. Private citizens mistakenly kill innocent people only 30 times a year, compared with about 330 mistaken killings by police. Criminals succeed in taking a gun away from an armed victim less than 1 percent of the time.” (Don B. Kates, Jr., 1995)
Don B. Kates, Jr., in his article, quotes the results of the survey conducted by one of the most prolific researcher in gun control - Gary Kleck, Florida State University's School of Criminology, who proved that gun-armed victims rout criminals three to four times more often than gun-armed criminals attack victims. And a victim who resists with a gun is only half as likely to be injured as a victim who submits— and far less likely to be robbed or raped.
Moreover, University of Maryland political scientist Ted Robert Gurr and State University of New York criminologist Hans Toch concluded in the Sixties 'reducing the availability of the handgun will reduce firearms violence.' Based on subsequent research, however, each now repudiates this judgment. 'When used for protection,' Toch writes, 'firearms can seriously inhibit aggression and can provide a psychological buffer against the fear of crime”. Furthermore, the fact that national patterns show little violent crime where guns are most dense implies that guns do not elicit aggression in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, these findings suggest that high saturations of guns in places, or something correlated with that condition, inhibit illegal aggression.
Gurr has come to believe that handgun prohibition 'would criminalize much of the citizenry but have only marginal effects on criminals,' while 'overemphasis on such proposals diverts attention from the kinds of conditions that are responsible for much of our crime, such as persisting poverty for the black underclass and some whites and Hispanics.' Gurr adds that guns can be an effective defense, noting that UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] historian Roger McGrath's evidence from the 19th-century American West 'shows that widespread gun ownership deterred' acquisitive crimes. 'Modern studies,' he writes, 'also show that widespread gun ownership deters crime. Convicted robbers and burglars report that they are deterred when they think their potential targets are armed.'
In 1982 the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove received nationwide publicity for enacting the nation's first handgun ban. Surprisingly little attention was paid to two remarkable responses. One was a letter an inmate in a Florida prison wrote the editor of a local newspaper: 'If guns are banned, then I as a criminal feel a lot safer. When a thief breaks into someone's house or property, the first thing to worry about is getting shot by the owner. But now, it seems we won't have to worry about that anymore.' Branding it a 'fantasy that just because guns are outlawed we, the crooks, can't get guns,' the author asserted that 'the only people who can't are the ones we victimize.… Drugs are against the law. Does that stop us? It's also against the law to rob and steal. But does a law stop us?” (Don B. Kates, Jr., 1995)
In 1983 the National Institute of Justice funded a survey of two thousand felons in state prisons across the U.S. In addition to overwhelmingly endorsing the views set out above, 39 percent of the felons in the NIJ survey said they had aborted at least one crime because they believed the intended victim was armed; 8 percent had done so 'many' times; 34 percent had been 'scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim'; and 69 percent knew at least one acquaintance who had had such an experience. Thirty-four percent of the felons said that in contemplating a crime they either 'often' or 'regularly' worried that they 'might get shot at by the victim.' Asked about criminals in general, 56 percent of the inmates agreed that 'a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun'; 57 percent agreed that 'most criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police'; 58 percent agreed that 'a store owner who is known to keep a gun on the premises is not going to get robbed very often'; and 74 percent agreed that 'one reason burglars avoid houses when people are home is that they fear being shot during the crime.' (Don B. Kates, Jr., 1995)
In 1992 Washington Post reporters interviewed the 114 inmates in D.C.'s Lorton Prison who had been convicted of at least one gun crime. The inmates agreed that gun control is not the answer and they anticipated no difficulty obtaining an illegal gun. Though many claimed to want to go straight, 25 percent flatly said they would get a gun as soon as they emerged from prison.
In Law Enforcement Technology magazine's 1991 poll of two thousand policemen across the nation, 76 percent of street officers believed that licenses to carry concealed handguns for protection should be issued to every trained, responsible adult applicant; only 59 percent of managers agreed. Ninety-one percent of street officers opposed banning semi-automatic 'assault rifles,' compared to 66 percent of top management. On the other hand, 94 percent of street officers felt that private citizens should keep handguns in their homes and offices for self-defense, and 93 percent of top management agreed. Over all, 93 percent of the respondents supported defensive ownership of handguns, 85 percent felt gun control had little potential to reduce crime, 79 percent opposed banning 'assault weapons,' and 63 percent supported widespread carrying of concealed handguns by trained civilians. (Don B. Kates, Jr., 1995)
Every year since 1988, the National Association of Chiefs of Police has polled the nation's more than fifteen thousand police agencies, with a response rate of 10 percent or more. The respondents have consistently said that their departments are understaffed and unable to adequately protect individuals; that law-abiding, responsible adults should have the right to own 'any type of firearm' for self-defense; and that banning guns will not reduce crime. In these and other surveys police generally support moderate controls, such as background checks, designed to exclude felons from gun ownership to the extent possible without obstructing defensive ownership by law-abiding citizens. (Don B. Kates, Jr., 1995)
Although firearms are used in about 12 percent of violent crimes, it is unlikely that any kind of gun control legislation could remove more than a handful of those firearms from felons' hands - and there is no evidence that the disarmed criminals using them would not then turn to other weapons. Most criminals do not obtain firearms through conventional sources. Thus, as opponents of gun control correctly contend, gun control measures in the United States, if anything, contribute to increased criminal violence because they deny guns to honest citizens but not to criminals. They might accurately be called victim disarmament laws.
Armed citizens pose a risk of punishment to criminals - perhaps more so than does the criminal justice system. Gun ownership may exert as much of a deterrent effect on violent crime and burglary as the criminal justice system does. The battle over gun control is not about controlling inanimate objects; it is about controlling people. To extend gun controls would make the nation better for criminals and worse for people.
Most gun control laws make no distinction between law-abiding citizens and lawbreakers. They imply that anyone possessing a gun is likely to use it to break the law, so they typically attempt to limit possession to those who are able to justify their specific need for a gun to government officials. Controls, especially as administered by ordinary people, give little consideration to any benefits of gun ownership or to the possible need of law-abiding persons to resist criminals. As in the case of efforts to control people's use of illicit drugs, there are good reasons to doubt the government's ability to control the possession of guns, even with intrusive infringements on liberty.