Need For Gun Control in the United States Analytical Research

Need For Gun Control In the United StatesNameInstitutional AffiliationDate
Need For Gun Control in the United States
Gun control is the domestic regulation on the use of firearms in a country. The control comes in many ways such as the manufacture, trade, use, possession, and transport. There are many terms which are used to refer to gun control such as gun safety, gun violence regulation, and firearms regulation. The weapons include small arms such as the pistols, rifles, light machine guns, carbines and submachine guns. There are approximately 875 million firearms that are possessed by civilians, law enforcement agencies and the armed forces CITATION Dav15 \l 1033 (Kopel, 2015). The US civilians account for about 75% of this number. With the prevailing deaths out the ownership of illegal guns, there is need to control the use of guns in the United States for a better future.
There are high rates of gun mortality rates in the United States, and therefore there is need for gun control. Most of the countries in the world allow their civilians to purchase and own firearms subject to a set of restrictions on the use of the firearms. In most of the studies that have been carried out, the United States and Yemen are the only countries that have distinct gun ownership policies that appear to be having more permissive regimes for the ownership of firearms by civilians. In the other countries that ownership of firearms is considered to be a privilege and therefore the legislation that governs the use of firearms is very restrictive.
Need for gun control
More than 31,000 people die in a year as a result of gunshot wounds in the United States. A large number of individuals who die due to shots are young, and therefore gun violence is ranked as one of the leading causes of premature death in the USCITATION Barth \l 1033 (Barrett, 2014). In the year 2013, there was an estimated number of 337,000 non-fatal violent crimes that were committed by the use of guns. These figures clearly show that gun violence in America is rampant and there is the need for the stakeholders to take action to avoid the rising cases of gun violence.
On December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, 6 teachers and 20 children were slaughtered by a young man who had broken into the school by shooting in the air using his automatic rifle. The action broke the hearts of many citizens in the US, and some mayors joined the coalition of Mayors Against the Use of Illegal guns to advocate for the regulation on the use of firearms. There are so many cases of gun violence that go unreported in the US. Americans constitute most of the heavily armed societies in the world with an approximately 40% of the households in the United States containing firearms CITATION Bov15 \l 1033 (Bovey, 2015). As such the number of homicide cases that occur in the US are ten times higher than the ones that happen in the other developed countries. Violence is attributed to many causes. When a gun is involved in cases of violence, then the likelihood of death occurring in such an instance is very high as compared to a situation where the gun is not used.
One of the leading causes of gun violence is the illegal market of the firearms that works against the legislation that guides the firearms industry. Every illegal gun that is in the hands of people began its life as a legal product that was either manufactured by a company that is licensed by the government and sold by someone who has been licensed CITATION Barth \l 1033 (Barrett, 2014). The firearms can enter the illegal market in many ways. Daniel Webster who is the director of Gun Policy and Research School conducted a study in New York to identify the number of state gun dealers by the use of crime data. He realized that there was a high number of gun dealers who used ‘straw purchasers' to escape court monitor. Straw purchasers are the ones who lie that they are the actual buyers of the gun so as to stand in for the real buyer to escape background check. It may also get into the illegal market by being purchased legally and then sold to someone else illegally. It, therefore, shows that no matter the way the firearms end up being in the wrong and the basic fact is that it has been acquired through legitimate means.
The main way that can be used to curb the illegal market is by making sure that we prevent the illegal migration of guns from the legal domain by controlling the supply of the weapons CITATION Wil07 \l 1033 (Wilson, 2007). Focusing only on illicit market cannot be very helpful in avoiding the rising number of cases of homicides and unintentional shootings in the United States. Most of the elected officials at the national and state level have tried to avoid gun violence by passing laws that apply mostly after a gun violence has just happened instead of focusing on the coming up with rules that can be used to prevent such incidences. There are efforts such as the use of metal detectors, voluntary buybacks, allocation of more resources for the police, increasing the terms of imprisonment for the criminals and public campaigns have been carried out to educate the people on the use of firearms CITATION Jos13 \l 1033 (Joseph, 2013).
Most of the existing gun laws are state laws even though the ordinary citizens face difficulties in obtaining information about how and when to use the firearms. The emotional and the economic aspect of gun violence is felt at the community levels. They include the schools, neighborhoods, and places of work, hospitals, and households and in the prisons. An examination of the state gun policies will help us to come with many policy options. The states that have highly developed systems of firearm regulation can be used to serve as policy testing sites by the government. The limitation of using the state laws is that they are not uniform and therefore there is the need for the federal government to come up with policies that are uniform. It means that very strict gun laws by a certain state may be undermined...