Gun Control Laws

Do you think every American citizen deserves the right to buy a gun? Every citizen? What about Aaron Alexis? He is an American citizen. He was also born with certain unalienable rights. The only thing that sets him apart is that he has a history of misconduct in the Navy and gun-related incidents as a civilian, and had been arrested for two previous gun incidents. Because of poorly regulated restrictions and background check for the purchase of guns, this man easily bought one. This same man killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard with the shotgun he bought legally from a gun store. Did he still have an equal right to buy a gun? No. There should be more restrictions and background checks for the sale of guns, not to interfere with the constitutional right of owning guns, but to limit the amount of people with a history of criminal activities and mental illness from getting their hands on guns. What if there was some way to prevent people like Aaron Alexis from getting guns? By simply enacting a law that requires universal background checks for every purchase of firearms would help reduce the number of criminals and mentally unstable people from obtaining a gun. Today, anyone can go to a private gun show and legally buy a gun without any sort of background check. The FBI denied 72,659 attempted gun buys in 2010, based on red flags raised by the background check system, according to the most recent data available from the Department of Justice. That’s just 1.2 percent of the more than 6 million applications. The only problem is that private sales of guns don’t require background checks so 100% of the people buying guns on line or at a gun show are able to buy one, no questions asked. It’s like fishing with a net that has holes in it the size of Texas. Even if the restrictions only applied to criminals with gun violence histories there would be a smaller risk of future gun violence. Some skeptics may say that enforcing gun control laws violates the rights of the American people, however, the only people even effected by these new laws would be the mentally ill, drug or alcohol abusers, and criminals, the ones none of us want owning a gun. In the data collected form the Department of Justice the most common reasons for being denied a gun were nearly half felony indictment or conviction; 19 percent were fugitives; and 11 percent were those who had violated state laws. Most law-abiding citizens who have done none of these things have nothing to lose and would not be affected in any way, shape, or form. Some other people who say they would be affected by going through the trouble of a background check for private purchases need to realize that the small, petty, selfish “inconvenience” this would cost them could have save the lives of the 12 people killed in the Washington Navy Yard. The families of those brutally murdered, would have done anything they could to