September 22, 2016

Dear Mr. or Mrs. Next President:

Gun violence is too high, and there should be some way to control who obtains guns and how easily they do so. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NBIRS) shows that there is a strong positive relationship between the availability of illegal guns and violent crime. The more people that can obtain guns, the higher chance someone uses it in a terrible way. There are some people in the world who should not be able to obtain guns. The more of them that do, the less safe everyone else is. Any non-deadly person should be able to buy a gun, if they go through some sort of testing or mental check. Self protection is still a major part of society; there will be mentally unstable people and you will need to have some sort of protection against them.

In “The Journal of Risk and Uncertainty,” the author states that we could reduce gun violence by 30% if we spend an estimated 24.5 billion dollars, which is roughly 1.2 million dollars per injury. We spend billions on unfunded tax cuts that we could use to reduce one of the biggest problems in our country today, should not even be hesitated at, it should be shelled out immediately. So much of this violence could be stopped or prevented.

In most large cities, there are gangs; for example, in Hollenbeck, Los Angeles, the leading violent crime is caused by gun violence. Operation Ceasefire was created to try and stop gun violence in that area. Operation Ceasefire made all members of a gang responsible for any crimes that an individual in that gang committed, it also increased police and in certain areas where the gangs were likely buying their guns. Most gangs in Hollenbeck were basically neutralized during the procedures, which shows that when the police stepped in and made an effort to stop dangerous people from getting guns to commit major crimes, the major violence was reduced.