Dear next president,

My name is Alyssa Brown and I think taking guns away is unnecessary. Nowadays most liberals want to take our guns away to make a “safer environment”, but guns keep us safe. “Guns save more lives than they take; prevent more injuries than they inflict, guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense, and less than 8% of the time their attacker is killed.”(1) Guns can kill a person but they can't pull their own triggers; its not the weapons fault it's the person behind it.

Many Americans live with a handgun in their homes. “36% of Americans keep a gun in their house to protect themselves from an intruder that breaks in. 3.7 million burglaries occur each year and in 7% violence has occurred.”(2) That might not seem like a lot but what if your family was a part of that small percent. Keeping our families safe is important to all of us. Would you want your family to be robbed and/or potentially hurt. I lived in Pontiac for over than half of my life. Police sirens played all night, break ins happened down the street, and my dad realized he needed something to keep us safe. He had already had guns for hunting but when things got really bad he bought a handgun to keep us safe. It calmed my fears of a break in because i knew i was secure.

On the flip side there had been many reasons to to take them away. In 2016 399 mass shootings were recorded in America, and 515 were killed in them(3). I couldn't imagine being a part of those families in their time of grieving. 515 doesn't even seem like a dent in the 318.9 million people that live in America, but to those families who lost apart of their people are just broken. A part of themselves died with their loved ones leaving them lost not knowing where/who to look to. “Reports suggest that up to 60% of perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States since 1970 displayed symptoms of mental illness”(4). Meaning that many of these people that killed weren't right in the head and not given the help they needed. This isn't an excuse for what they did, but for some it wasn't really them.

Some people think guns are bad because a person could die at the hand of one, so they believe if guns were illegal we would be safe. Wrong, knifes, bats, and other things could be used as a weapon to kill a person just like a gun. “...11,961 murders performed within the U.S. in 2014, 1,567 were committed with knives and only 248 murders were known to have been committed using rifles of any type, including single-shot long arms and “assault rifles” routinely demonized by gun control groups…”(5). Guns not being the main killing weapon changes everything. Some say guns kill they should be illegal, but so do knives. Does that mean the next thing we will take away is the utensil? Weapons killing aren't killing people, people are.

So, next Mr/Mrs President what you can do to stop all the controversy is to make some regulations. Some gun stores you go to don't even need to see your license to buy a gun. Make people have to go through a more thorough background check, make them take a class and get a license. We can't have just anybody running round the streets with a firearms, because those are the people that abuse the power. We can't have our guns taken away though.

Sources:

1)https://www.gunowners.org/sk0802htm.htm

2)https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vdhb.pdf

3)https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data

4)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

5)http://www.infowars.com/fbi-far-more-murders-committed-with-knives-than-assault-rifles/