Essay on Gun Control Debate

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Gun Control Debate Paper
Today in the United States gun control is a topic of immense debate, because of the shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary located in Newtown, Connecticut. This most recent tragic event ended the lives of 20 students and six adults. Similar events have occurred across the United States at a movie theater in Colorado, on college campuses in Texas and Virginia, or at the grocery store in Arizona each destroying families in many communities. The questions deserving consideration is have the American people had enough lives destroyed by these horrible events and are Americans ready for the federal government to impose stricter gun control laws. Learning Team C is for stricter gun control laws and will
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Annually the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) retrieves data from law enforcement agencies to compile a report called Crime in the United States. In September 2012, the report contains an overview of the statistics from 2011. The information pertains only to violent crimes normally committed with a weapon. A violent crime, by the FBI (2011) definition “is composed of four offenses: murder or no negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault; offenses which involve force or threat of force.”
In 2011, violent crimes on a nationwide scale decreased by an estimated 3.8 % from 2010 with approximately 386 violent crimes per 100,000 people committed. Aggravated assault was the most reported violent act with robbery, forcible rape, and murder in lesser percentages. The chart below shows the decrease in violent crime from 2007 to 2011. According to, the preliminary data collected, the FBI estimates that during the first six months of 2012, violent crime increased by 1.9 %.

Position for More Restrictive Gun Laws Taking a position in support of more restrictive gun laws suggests that stricter gun control regulation is required to decrease the amount of gun violence experienced in the recent years. A new Huffington Post survey reports that about 50 % of Americans think gun laws should be made stricter, 29 % believe that the