Essay On Gun Culture

Words: 684
Pages: 3

The gun culture in America is a highly debated topic and the two sides have been at each other years. To fully understand this debate, one must first understand what gun culture is and what makes America’s gun culture so unique to the rest of the world.
The term gun culture ties together the public’s general stance of guns in the hands of civilians. In more detail, gun culture includes people’s options, behaviours and attitudes towards guns and their uses.
In America the main uses for guns include hunting, sport, other recreational uses and the big one in the argument over America’s gun culture is using a gun for self-defence. If you take a glance at America’s neighbours Canada their gun culture consists of sport shooting and hunting and not
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The pro-gun side is led by the National Rifle Association. The NRA was founded in 1871 whose vision was “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation” But this took a turn in 1975, when the NRA created a new NRA campaign, ‘designed to enrol defenders of the right to keep and bear arms’.
The NRA have a massive influence over politicians and will go back to cities and run negative advertising, twisting voting records and these members vote because they are afraid of the consequences. Even though a majority of Americans now support tougher laws controlling gun sales, according to a Gallup poll, 55 percent of Americans favour stricter gun control legislation. The NRA is one of the main reasons that these laws will never change.
Now if we take a look at Australia’s gun culture we can see it is very different and this is why. On April 28, 1996, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Martin Bryant entered a café at the historic Port Arthur in Hobart, Tasmania, armed with three automatic firearms. He shot dead thirty-five people and wounded twenty-three. Prime Minister John Howard devised an action plan, this plan banned the possession and use of certain types of firearms by