Where would you and I be right now if guns were banned or regulated in the 1700’s? Most likely we would be having tea and crumpets while we sang “God Save the Queen.” Fortunately, things did not happen that way at all. I will enjoy my beer and pizza and sing “The Star Spangled Banner.” I am a proud American who is grateful for the sacrifices that were given to ensure that I have the rights and freedoms that I do today. I served thirteen years in the United States Army ready to defend and die to preserve those very rights and freedoms. These rights and freedoms were paid for by the blood of our Forefathers. I believe it is our responsibility to ensure that these rights and freedoms are not taken from us. I know I will not stand by as my second amendment rights are taken from me. I am not suggesting we rise up with our guns and fight the opposition. I am merely suggesting that we need to get the facts out and shoot some knowledge towards some people.
I am really disturbed with the media’s coverage over the current gun laws that we have in our country. I am bothered by how they are allowing groups to use this unfortunate event that happened in Sandy Hook Massachusetts to push their political agendas. I see they are trying to describe the civilian purchased AR-15 as a military grade automatic assault weapon. To a person who does not know the difference, this just makes sense to them. People will just imagine a scene from an old Rambo movie. Rambo pops up out of the water and pulls the trigger and hundreds to thousands of bullets fly and kill. An AR-15 is modeled after the military’s M16A2 rifle. The M16A2 rifle is a true automatic assault weapon. This means with a single pull of the trigger, the weapon will fire until you either release the trigger or it runs out of ammunition. The civilian purchased AR-15 is a semi-automatic weapon. This means the trigger needs to be pulled and released for every single shot.(Adams, 2013) This drastically changes the rate of fire of the two weapons by 50 percent. The Citizens Crime Commission of New York City state that there have been 30 mass shootings involving these types of weapons with a large ammunition capacity from 1984-2012. (Citizens Crime Commission) With these shootings, 289 people were killed. Using the reports published by the Uniform Crime Rates system, the Disaster Center reports that 524,675 murders occurred during the same period of time. I am not trying to make light of a human death, but this means that the weapons they are trying to take from me accounts for only .055% of the murders. (The Disaster Center) This is why I get upset when they use these tragic events to play on human emotions for their agenda.
I have spent thirteen years in the Army training on different types of firearms and I have become very efficient using them. I am personally a gun owner. I love the fact that I have the right to own weapons. It gives me and my children a sense of security. If it is not bad enough that they want to take my semi-automatic weapons away from me, they also want to take away my right to open carry or carry a concealed weapon. Critics feel that the more access we have to weapons and carry them, that the crime rate will increase. Studies have shown in the past when a state has changed their concealed weapon laws to allow it, the murder rates have decreased. Recently the crime rate has decreased in Springfield and Clark Counties in Ohio after the state approved the carrying concealed weapons law. Some experts are claiming the decrease is caused from other things but Brooke Wagner states otherwise. Brooke Wagner is a criminologist and an associate professor of