Gun Laws
Bang! The last sound a 12 year-old heard as his life was cut short by a stray bullet shot from somewhere off in the distant. His life ended. His life remembered only as statistic. Numbers on a sheet. All this may have been prevented with just one simply law.
Dear Sir or Madam President,
Your stance on the pandemic of gun violence sweeping across the United States could change the fate of thousands injured or killed in gun-related incidents yearly. Do not let the people harmed in firearm-related incidents be simple statistics, pushed to the side and forgotten, but rather use them as a driving force to get gun laws revised, taking more of them off the streets, possibly saving potential victims.
Many pro-gun activists will argue that simply taking guns off the street won’t solve all the gun-related crimes. This opinion must be yielded to when considering the creation of stricter gun possession laws. The realization will come to light that countries with strict gun laws such as Japan and the United Kingdom have some of the lowest gun related crime rates in the world. According to ABC News, Japan had 0.6 crimes committed per 100 firearms, while the United Kingdom had 6.2 crimes committed per 100 firearms in 2013. These rates, even when combined and doubled, do not equal the United State’s rate of 88.8 crimes committed per 100 firearms. The low rate of firearm crimes in UK and Japan appears to be a product of their strict gun laws. The US may be able to follow the same model of these countries by simply enacting stricter laws on firearms.
A second argument pro-gun activists use to justify the lack of stricter firearm ownership laws is that the U.S. Constitution would be violated. The Second Amendment, which protects a person’s right to bear arms, was one of the original ten amendments. The government cannot legally take guns away from it’s citizens. The United States, however, has changed drastically from the seventeen hundreds. Guns and other forms of defense were needed in everyday life, especially in regions where there was little to no law enforcement. Modern society is much more stable and law enforcement is more prevalent and established. People do not need the same defenses as they did long ago. It is a different time.
A question to you, future President, will you keep letting fellow Americans experience the fear of being shot? Why must children learn how to hide from a shooter in school? Why must a mother attend the funeral of her child, a victim of random gunfire? Only if we change the laws to limit the amount of guns available to the public can we cut down the threat of shootings and other gun related incidents.
Sincerely your fellow American.