Gun Control Research Paper

Submitted By aogden
Words: 1383
Pages: 6

The Killer is not the Weapon, the Possessor of One is
December 14, 2012 was a day of tragedy that America faced. A twenty year old man, armed with two pistols, murdered his mother. Afterward, he went to his mother’s kindergarten class and opened fire at innocent children and faculty members, killing twenty-seven lives. After the Sandy Hook misfortune, distraught parents and citizens have shoved ideas toward Obama and government officials about enforcing even stricter gun control then what the country already has intact. Gun control has now been an epidemic of law-making and an upraised controversy. Like getting your driving license, owning a gun is a privilege you earn and not a privilege you are born with. Would banning guns be an effective act to end the violence caused from armed weaponry? More so than the banning of guns, it is the abolishment of violence in the media that will lessen the rate of crime and brutality.
Laws of guns, or the ability to obtain weaponry, have been established starting from over two centuries ago. In 1791, the second amendment was confirmed, stating that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms. That amendment is of course still valid today. After the prohibition period in the 1920’s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the National

Firearm Act of 1934. In doing this, the president’s tenacity was to remove machine guns and gadget-like weapons off the streets. He then slapped gun manufactures a $200 tax on each firearm, which in todays’ dollars would be the equivalence of $2525. The 1920’s and 30’s were suffering from the Great Depression, so all of these taxes that the gun manufactures were given, essentially forced the gun makers to go out of business. This act also imposed for all buyers to fill out paperwork that then had to be approved by the Treasury Department. Americans started to do international trade with guns, so the Federal Firearm act was created in 1938. Anyone who was trading internationally would have to obtain a federal firearm license from the secretary of commerce and there would be a yearly fee of $1. Furthermore, the sellers of guns had to record the addresses and names to those they sold guns to and would be fined and convicted if they sold a gun to a known criminal. The year of 1968, two assassinations have occurred. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both murdered publicly by a possessor of a gun. Understandably, a new act was issued which was the gun control act. There were more in depth background checks to those who were in the process of obtaining a gun. A new law was created that you had to be twenty one to have a handgun, and eighteen to own a pistol or rifle. About twenty years had passed and the use of guns had still not become an epidemic issue. In 1986, the Law Enforcements Protection act was created, prohibiting manufactures and traders to sell armor piercing ammunition. Four years later the Crime Control Act was established, forcing to create a strategy to promote drug-free zones in schools by strictly penalizing those who possess or use a firearm. The Brandy Handgun Violence Prevention Act, created in 1994, enforced FBI to perform backgrounds checks to any unlicensed civilian who wants to purchase a gun. The same year the Assault Weapon Ban abolished the production, trade, and purchase of new semiautomatic weapons to civilian use. Undoubtedly, gun laws have traveled a long time in U.S. history, with almost each decade it becoming more difficult to obtain a gun. But with the 400 million civilians living in America, it is difficult for authorities to enforce strict rules on something like weapons which can easily be hidden, traded, and created. America has an extensive history of laws made to ban something, but it never fully succeeds. Sly Americans always find a way around restrictions and conduct illegal activity right under the authority’s nose. In the well-known decade of the roaring twenties Prohibition was established.