Gun Control

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Date: 22 July, 2011
Gun Control
Nations have to protect themselves, others apart from policing their territories, which is a fundamental power that is vested by sovereignty. However, there are circumstances under which such powers can be lost. There are countries as well as individuals who have been forced to disarm due national or global security. For instance, nations which have been violating international arms control treaties, in the name of protecting their territories have ended up facing a range of penalties and sanctions concerning firearms that other nation placed on them. As a result, both national and regional police and services have enforced their own gun control regulations. for instance, in the U.S, a body called Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is charged with the responsibility of supporting “the United States' International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) program to aggressively enforce this mission and reduce the number of weapons that are illegally trafficked worldwide from the United States and used to commit acts of international terrorism, to subvert restrictions imposed by other nations on their residents, and to organized crime and narcotics-related activities,” (Kruschke 85)
Though many have claimed that the rate of criminal activities has skyrocketed in Australia and UK from 1996, the time at which the stricter gun control laws came into being. But the reality remains that, the police in UK just changed their crime recording systems due to the implementation of gun control new laws. This change has been made in a manner that crime instances are made public as compared to earlier instances. As a result, it has given an indication that the crime rate has skyrocketed yet the reverse is true. According to the British Crime survey which way not affected by this law in any way, have their statistics indicating that the crime rate has decreased drastically. By looking at violent crime section in the British Crime Survey, “The increase in violent crime recorded by police, in contrast to estimates provided from the BCS, appears to be largely due to increased recording by police forces. Taking into account recording changes, the real trend in violence against the person in 2001/02 is estimated to have been a reduction of around five percent," (Halbrook, 60)
In addition, the claim that gun ban has increased in major parts of the world like in Australia is also false. Any context based on this statistics that posts a cause and effect relation existing between gun buyback program and increased rates of crime is wrong. This is because, it has been based on the fact that, criminals are now sure that their target neither has nor arms, which makes them suspects automatically. This fact is not true as even earlier, such victims were not even. By comparing the homicide in some countries which have stricter gun control policies like Australia, one can see that they are much more less than these countries which have weaker gun control policies. Currently, Firearms in some countries like Australia are not often used in crime activities like murder, sexual assaults as well as robbery as it used to be before enactment of gun control policies. In Australia for instance, the Attorney General asserted that, “The 54 firearm-related homicides in Australia in 1998 equate to a rate of only 0.28 per 100,000 people. I have been advised that this compares to a rate which is in the order of 4 per 100,000 in the United States. Now that you have the facts, I request that you withdraw immediately the misleading information from your latest campaign," (Kopel 270).
The issue that has been presented explaining that the process of keeping guns in people’s homes has a very high chance of increasing personal protection is also misleading. It is much oblivious that, the argument that having firearms is the best self defense is just misleading. This is because; those having firearms have higher chances of becoming homicide victims. according to two studies that were established in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’, showed that the issue of keeping guns in homes results to an increase fin both homicide and suicide risks. According to the statistics provided in the journal, having guns increases the probability of someone becoming a victim of homicide and suicide by around 2.7 times, (Suter 255). This is based on the fact that, mostly, victims have a relation with the murder, or acquainted with the person who committed murder. In addition, it increases the probability of someone committing suicide by 4.5. According to security experts, the presence of guns provides the assurance that the suicide attempt will be ...