Wednesday, July 24, 2013

A634.8.3.RB - Gun Control: What is the Answer?

I have never been a big fan of guns not because I am for or against gun control but because I have no real desire to use a gun.  There are no guns in my house and I didn’t grow up around guns either.  Most days you can turn on the TV and hear about a shoot-out or an accidental shooting.  I am frankly most surprised by the number of accidental shootings that involve children.  With all the safety that is involved with owning a gun AKA going through classes to actually understand the power of a gun you would think that these deaths would decrease.
            Wanting to be safe in your own home is a big desire to keep a gun in your house however you need to know how to use it, where to keep it and how to disarm someone who gets control of your gun.  I fired a gun a total of three times in my life.  One was a musket black powder gun (made for right handed people and I am a leftie), and two were 9mm. I was scared to use those guns or to even pick them up.  My hands were sweaty and shook when I held it.  Pulling the trigger though was a completely different experience.  It gave me a whole new respect for guns.  Guns are like a very complicated math problem.  It is not enough to know how to solve the problem you should understand why you are solving it. 
            The text talked about different ways for gun control and made some great arguments for and against guns.  Would making owning a gun better?  What about more rules in place for having a gun….tougher gun laws?  In the article I found online they seemed to think that more gun laws equated to fewer deaths but on the other side of this there were some states that only had a few gun laws and the death toll was still low.  Will making gun laws tougher really lower the death toll?  What about taking guns away from everyone and only letting the police or military carry weapons?
            I don’t think taking guns away is going to stop crimes from happening nor will it keep people from getting killed.  Cars are not designed to kill they are designed to get us from one place to another safely, yet people are killed by cars everyday either by drunk drivers, distracted drivers or accidents so should we ban all cars so that our chances of being killed by a car decreases?  No we find ways to improve the car to make it better, safer for everyone. 
            Perhaps the same thing should be done for guns.  Let’s improve gun safety instead finding ways to make guns more violent (why do we need bullets that can penetrate a vest).  Why do we need A-K 47 to go hunting?  Maybe we need to start looking at the types of guns that are available and decide what why we need them and how available they should be.  You have cases like the Zimmerman/Martin case.  If there was not a gun involved would Martin still be alive?  Perhaps but maybe he would have still died at the hands of Zimmerman or the other way around Martin could have killed Zimmerman by slamming his head into the concrete or been choked to death.   

            Banning guns is not going to lower the death tolls quickly but maybe over time it would but humans are crafty and we would come up with others ways to defend ourselves against those who would do us harm.  Making guns safer and taking some of the more dangerous guns and making them harder to get could make a difference. http://news.yahoo.com/more-gun-laws-fewer-deaths-50-state-study-224508338.html

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