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Stricter Gun Control Laws

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Gun violence in the United States may not be as sever as it once was, but it is again highly publicized because of the recent school shooting. With the recent mass murders that have happened in the United States, the question arises about how to prevent these acts from happening again. Some people believe that we should take away all guns while others believe stricter gun laws should be enacted. The purpose of this paper is to explore the gun control laws that we have in the United States as well as their effectiveness as a deterrent for gun violence. Another aspect that we will be looking at is whether stricter gun laws would help prevent gun violence any better. It is apparent that the gun control laws in the United States do not act as a …show more content…
It seems fitting that we have an age restriction for guns. A person must also have a clean record to buy a gun because there is a background check, and for a person to carry a pistol, they must take a gun safety course. There are many other laws dealing with the manufacturing and trading of guns as well as other categories, but the ones previously mentioned deal with the direct distribution of guns to people. Of course, with every law there are lawbreakers and inevitably people will and do commit gun crimes. When it comes to dealing with the issue of gun violence, lawmakers are stuck between a rock and a hard-place. If they do nothing, as they are doing now, they people get offended and if they do make stricter gun laws then people will get offended. This is where we stand today, with lawmakers not knowing what to do and citizens frustrated. Some people want guns taken away all together while some want to make it harder to get guns. LaFollette (2000) suggests that it is immoral to take away peoples’ guns because that would be taking away a means of self-defense, he also states that guns are only valuable as a means of self defense (p. 266). His statements hold a lot of validity as a response to the …show more content…
167-168). Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson developed this theory and I believe it does an excellent job in explaining gun violence in the United States. For someone to commit a gun crime they must either know that they are committing a crime or be of an unsound mind. For someone to know that they are committing a crime and do it anyway, one could assume that they have lost their self-control. I say lost their self-control because there had to have been a point in time where that person wasn’t committing that crime. Another reason why you could say people that commit gun crimes have lost their self-control is because in cases like the recent school shooting, the offender had a thought-out plan, it wasn’t a spontaneous decision. Now, if the offender was of a sound mind or not is a different story all together, but he had many opportunities to stop what he was doing. This act of following through with a known crime illustrates poor

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