Gun ownership is constitutionally protected in the United States, embedded in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," (Bill of Rights, 1789). The interpretation of this constitutional right has become the topic of heated debate in the United States. As the Library of Congress points out, the meaning of the Second Amendment is "not self-evident," as are many items in the Constitution that were written, deliberately or not, in a vague manner that left matters up to future interpretations of the law by the judiciary. While other countries in the world find the American gun control issue perplexing, Americans continue to grapple with how to form and defend their own personal militias.
The Supreme Court has ruled on several Second Amendment cases, always upholding the validity of the Second Amendment and never questioning its efficacy as part of the Constitution. After all, the United States was founded on the principles of freedom and liberty and that does mean that individuals do have the right to take up arms against their government or against anyone else they perceive to be a threat. Americans also have the right to commit suicide, which accounts for sixty percent of all gun-related deaths (Masters, 2016). One of the most recent Supreme Court rulings related to the Second Amendment was in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Court struck down a local Washington, D.C. handgun restriction law. Thus, while states and municipalities can pass laws that restrict, regulate, or control gun sales or possession, they cannot pass laws that completely and outright ban the sale or possession of firearms.
For radical groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA), gun ownership and sales has become much more than about protecting the Second Amendment from being infringed upon. The Second Amendment is safe. Liberals who advocate for gun control rarely, if ever, request that the Second Amendment be revoked or even amended, only that it be interpreted differently and in accordance with evidence, facts, science, and reason.
The NRA and Rabid Unreasonableness
The NRA (2016) has become an organization that reflexively opposes any type of gun control or gun regulation. Commentators like Davidson (2015) use logical...
Being too difficult is not a reason for not mandating background checks. Davidson (2015) also claims that assault weapons are "not more powerful" than other guns, without explaining exactly why (p. 1). Generally, the position of hard-lined gun advocates is less about logic, reason, and constitutionality as it is about anger, emotional responses, and contrarian liberal bashing. As Melzer (2015) puts it, gun rights organizations like the NRA and their "deeply committed supporters also purchase firearms for a more symbolic reason: to send a warming to the federal government that individuals have the rights and are willing to fight," (p. 793). People with guns can intimidate both people without guns and other people with guns, making gun ownership integral to a culture of fear and violence. As Lott (2010) also points out, many people who own guns claim that they have scared off intruders simply by brandishing the weapon, indicating a relatively high prevalence of nonviolent the use of guns in self-defense scenarios. Self-defense is indeed on the of the most common arguments in favor of relaxed or non-existent gun regulations. The argument is that people need guns to defend themselves from other people who have guns, which leads to another argument: which is that there are too many guns already on the market for gun control to be of any use. "Too many Americans already own weapons," (Spitzer, 2015, p. 7). Yet just like the fallacies inherent in the argument that background checks would be too difficult to implement, there is also a fallacy in claiming that it would be too difficult to control guns because too many guns exist. There are workable options for both cases; it was difficult to build the Erie Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge, but those were completed. As Masters (2016) also points out, countries that used to have high rates of gun ownership but who decided to place tighter controls on guns have successfully implemented government buy-back programs. Davidson (2015) claims those programs do not work, but evidently they do, because the rates of gun violence in other wealthy, industrialized countries does not come close to the rates of gun violence in the United States. In fact, the rates of gun violence in the United States ranks near the top.
The Extent of the…
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