Congress can pass specific legislation to control what types of guns are sold, to whom, and how. The U.S. Supreme Court rules on whether congressional laws are in keeping with the letter and/or the spirit of the Second Amendment.
Redefinitions of the problem
The current debate over gun control is so volatile because even supporters of gun control acknowledge that it cannot be 100% effective. The school shooter in Sandy Hook, for example, was able to obtain guns legally given that his mother was an avid gun collector. However, there are also examples of persons with questionable mental health histories, such as the Virginia Tech killer, who likely would have been prohibited from owning a weapon had he been forced to submit to a background check. "Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in 2007 on the picturesque Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, had been deemed mentally ill by a judge, which is one of the criteria used to disqualify certain people trying to buy a gun" (Johns 2013). Jared Loughner, the shooter in the Colorado movie theater, did submit to a background check and was approved, having no major mental health or criminal violations on his record (Johns 2013). At present, the struggle over finding appropriate controls is defined as one between the rights of gun owners vs. The right of citizens to live in a more secure fashion, without worrying about dangerous people using guns.
Opposing policy ideas
The NRA has steadfastly opposed all forms of gun control, even relatively moderate ones, as a violation of Second Amendment rights. The NRA's powerful lobbying force has made many senators loathe to oppose the NRA, particularly senators from rural areas where guns are important...
While sweeping gun laws are required to improve America's issue of gun violence, evidence from Obama's attempts suggest that only gradual and small degrees of regulatory change will be capable of passing through a divided legislative branch. This literature demonstrates that even a public administrative force such as the executive branch must face power limitations. The very premise of the United States government is that the three branches work in
Gun Ownership and Gun Control In American culture today, guns are worshiped. Children play with toy guns, television and film glorify gun violence, teenagers show off guns to one another in order to get respect, and powerful lobbyist groups keep these weapons legal and accessible. There's something wrong with this picture. There's something wrong with a culture that believes guns are more important than feeding the hungry or sheltering the homeless.
Gun Control Guns can be easily hidden by anybody carrying them: they are tools of choice for individuals who opt to use them for self-defense. Unfortunately, they are also the tool of choice for criminals. Since guns are easy for criminals to steal, guns are quickly obtainable in the black market. Almost all criminal offenses involving weapons are done with the use of illegal guns; this is a key concern in
The stick was federal prosecution carrying long sentences with no parole in faraway prisons; the carrot was meetings where offenders were offered help getting shelter, job training and education. In many instances, individuals revert to gun violence when they believe themselves to be at a point of no hope (Chapman, 2006). The action plan therefore, will focus on providing job training, and education to allow individuals to become better
Gun Laws / Gun Violence Gun violence, gun registration, and mass shootings in the United States -- and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom -- have caused authorities great concern over the past few years. And these issues have received a great deal of media attention and hence are worthy of research. This paper reviews gun violence in the U.S. and in the UK, and gun laws that are
However, this is a common, recurrent theme that has been injected into the public sphere by private interests. As a result, it dominates a substantial amount of discourse in the public sphere, and even people like Griffin and Rostron, who believe that it is demoralizing and misleading and state those beliefs publicly, have had little success in challenging this misconception. Therefore, to have a real gun control debate in
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