Emilio Estrada

Estrada 1

Emilio Estrada

Mr. Erickson

English 1010

5/15/13

July 20, 2012, Aurora, Colorado, there is anticipation in the air. Everyone is excited to see the premiere of the new Batman movie, never stopping to think that their lives could end that night. Twenty minutes into the movie, an exit door near the screen opens up to reveal a man in all black clothes and a gas mask over his face. The figure throws an object into the crowd. A hissing noise fills the air followed by smoke. Pandemonium is unleashed when the black clad man starts to shoot his semi-automatic rifle into the helpless crowd of movie watchers. This was the terrifying beginning of how James Holmes, 24 years old, killed 12 people and wounded 58 more ("Timeline: Colorado Theater Shooting").

December 14, 2012, Newtown, Connecticut, a man exits his house for the day, leaving behind his mother, dead in her bed after being shot with a rifle. The man ends up at Sandy Hook Elementary School with the intent of causing havoc. Thechildren tried to hide, covered their ears to block out the sound of gunshots, justhoping that they will be able to see their families again. The man causing all of the fear and chaos goes on to murder twenty innocent children and six teachers with a Bushmaster rifle. After the spilling of innocent blood, the man turns his hand gun on himself and ends his own life (Memmott). This is how Adam Lanza will be remembered.

Because of these two shootings, gun control has become a hot button issue in the United States. What should be done to lower the rate of gun violence? There is no clear-cut answer to this question. Some say that we need increase gun control regulations, while others believe that the answer is more guns. Some people don’t even think that there is a gun problem but instead a problem within our society. The only thing that we know right now is that there is a problem and we need to fix it.[te1]

Now that we know that there is a problem, we need to know more about it. First, we should know what guns are allowed to be owned by everyday citizens. Machine guns, sawn-off shotguns and rifles, silencers and armor-piercing bullets are not allowed to be possessed by civilians. Possession of an automatic machinegun is illegal. Private possession of semiautomatic assault weapons and handguns are legal.5 High capacity magazines are also legal.[te2]

The next things we need to know about guns is that to get one from a licensed firearms dealer, you have to go through a background check. If, however, you buy a gun from a private seller from a gun show or the internet, there will be no background check. Many people have referred to this as the “gun show loophole.”

The last thing that we should know is how many people are hurt by guns.[te3] According to Edward Hill, Cleveland State University, it is estimated that there were about 286 million guns in the U.S. in the year 2011(Hill). There were also 11,101 murders caused by a gun in the same year according to a report by the CDC. So out of 15,953 total murders, guns were used in 70 percent of them. Guns were also used in over 19 thousand suicides (Hoyer, and Xu).That means out of 38,285 suicides in 2011, 52 percent of them involved a gun. The last piece of information that we should know before we begin is that there has been at least 62 mass shootings since 1982 (Follman, Aronsen, and Pan). These numbers are ridiculously high. Something has to be done to lower these ludicrous numbers. The question is how.[te4]

The first thing that should happen ismaking sure that criminals and the mentally ill do not get their hands on any gun, that’s a given. The next thing that should happen is that some types of guns and magazines need to be kept from the public. While some of the changes will meet some resistance, these changes need to be made in order to protect the citizens of this country.[te5]

So, let’s start going through the reasoning of limiting types of guns. The only type of gun that absolutely has to be taken out of civilianhands is assault weapons. Assault weapons are basically military weapons made for civilians, but they have features that make them deadlier. The perfect example of this is the AR-15 according to The Baltimore Sun. The AR-15 has a pistol grip, which helps the shooter to fire the gun faster and gives them better control of the recoil. The pistol grip also allows shooting from the hip and spraying the shots from side to side. This is very deadly when shooting into a crowd. Assault weapons also commonly have a barrel shroud. A barrel shroud protects a person’s hand from getting burned when they touch the barrel of a gun that just shot multiple bullets in rapid succession. This lets a person hold onto the barrel while shooting, giving the person more control over the gun. Folding or detachable stocks make the weapons easier to carry and conceal, this is a big factor in mass shootings. The easier it is to get a gun into a crowd, the easier it will be to kill a lot of people. The last thing that assault weapons have is a threaded barrel, whichallows someone to attach a silencer or flash suppressor. The flash suppressor can be huge in mass shooting situation, especially in low light conditions, because prevents a shooter from going temporarily blinded by the muzzle flash. These features, along with high capacity magazines, make assault weapons an easy way to kill a large amount of people in a short time("Why we should ban assault weapons ").

With more and more mass shootings being committed with assault weapons, the talk about passing a bill to ban them has gone up as well. A point that is brought up in these talks is that the United States has already passed an assault weapons ban in 1994 and it lasted up until 2004. The main problem with that ban, brought up by Brad Plumer from The Washington Post, was that it was filled with loopholes.[te6]

The first loophole that was exploited was that the ban did not give a good definition for assault weapons. For the definition, the law said that any semi-automatic rifle with a pistol grip and a bayonet mount was an assault weapon, but a semi-automatic rifle with a pistol grip or a bayonet mount might have been ok. That example was only one problem with the definition. A complicated flow chart was constructed to say what was and what was not an assault weapon and as the definition got more complicated, the easier it was to move around it. All the gun manufacturers had to do was do a small change to the appearance of the gun and it would not be banned anymore. The second large loophole in the assault weapons ban was when it targeted 18 gun models specifically. Gun makers were able to sell similar models that were basically the banned models with a small change. The final problem with the ban was that it only stopped the manufacturing of new assault weapons. The problem from this part of the law was that when gun makers first heard of the making of the ban, they decided to up the production of guns that could be affected by the ban (Plumer). So, dangerous assault weapons that were available to the public were still large in numbers. Now it is possible to bring into effect a stronger assault weapons ban, one that could help put bring down the number of mass shootings.

Along with assault weapons being a major problem, there is the problem with high capacity magazines. Currently there is no limit to how many bullets a gun magazine can hold. High capacity magazines have been used in many recent shootings like the Aurora shooting and the Newtown shooting. The argument for both sides of the high capacity magazine debate is timing. People for high capacity magazines like S.H Baneberry on guns.com, have said that they are for self defense.The less time you spend reloading then the more time you have to protect yourself and your family (Baneberry). The other side says that the more times that a mass shooter has to reload then the more times there are for someone to interrupt the shooting. These arguments are two sides of the same coin. The only question for both sides is does the number of bullets matter? If you are using the gun for self-defense then how many bullets do you need,and the question for the side against high capacity magazines, does the number of times a shooter reloads really matter, does is make any difference? In a shooting in Tucson, Arizona, it did.

Jared Loughner was subdued when he unloaded his 30 round magazine and was attempting to load another (Burns).Larry Burns, a judge that sentenced Loughner to seven life terms in prison, said the following about high capacity magazines:

I am not a social scientist … But reasonable, good-faith debates have boundaries, and in the debate about guns, a high-capacity magazine has always seemed to me beyond them.

Bystanders got to Loughner and subdued him only after he emptied one 31-round magazine and was trying to load another. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, chose as his primary weapon a semiautomatic rifle with 30-round magazines. And we don't even bother to call the 100-rounder that James Holmes is accused of emptying in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater a magazine — it is a drum. How is this not an argument for regulating the number of rounds a gun can fire?

I get it. Someone bent on mass murder who has only a 10-round magazine or revolvers at his disposal probably is not going to abandon his plan and instead try to talk his problems out. But we might be able to take the "mass" out of "mass shooting," or at least make the perpetrator's job a bit harder. (Burns)

“Make the perpetrator’s job a bit harder”(Burns). Isn’t that what some laws are made for? We know that if someone really wants crack cocaine, they will find a way to get it, but that does not mean that we just give up. We make it harder for them to get it. [te7]

Unfortunately, high capacity magazines and assault weapons are not the only things that are dangerous in this equation of violence. People have to be factored in as well. Most people are sane, law abiding citizens, but there are also some mentally ill people and some criminals in our society. We need to make sure that these types of people do not get their hands on any type of gun. The first line of defense is a background check. A background check can find out if someone is a criminal, mentally ill or anything else that raises a red flag. [te8]

The background check system at the moment is simple. A gun seller would put someone’s information into NICS, National Criminal Background Check System, to see if the person is eligible to buy a gun. The process takes about a minute (DeLuca). The laws for when you have to run a background check are mostly the same around the country,if you are a federally licensed gun seller then you need to run a check on every customer, but things start to change when you get to private sellers and gun shows. Most of the states, 33, do not have any laws regarding the “gun show loophole.” If everyone would close the loophole then there would be less of a chance of a criminal or mentallyill person getting a gun.

But there is an even bigger problem with the system than a loophole. The problem is that even with the background checks, mentallyill people are still getting guns. Forty of the sixty-two mass shootings were committed by a person that was mentallyill and of the forty, thirty-four of them got their guns legally (Follman, Aronsen, and Pan). The reason why the mentally ill are still able to get guns is because the states do not send the records for mentally ill people to be put in the database. The Virginia Tech shooter,Seung-Hui Cho, was able to pass a background check even though he was declared mentally unstable. This shows that there is a problem. There are only seven states that are not contributing to the problem. These seven states make up 98 percent of the names that are not allowed to own a gun because of mental illness (DeLuca). We need all of the states’ cooperation if we want background checks to work to the fullest. If two things were fixed, loopholes and state cooperation, then background checks would be able to stop so many deaths.

Some [te9]people that are against gun control laws have said gun control laws will not work, that if anything it will raise gun violence rates because laws only affect the law abiding. This argument against gun regulations is false. There are other developed countries that have strict gun control laws and they have low gun violence rates. Australia, Japan and the U.K. are three prime examples.

Let’s start with the U.K. According to Business Insider, America has 88 guns per 100 people, the U.K. only has 6.7. The weapons that can be owned legally in the U.K. are shotguns, black powder weapons and manually loaded handguns and rifles. If you are a criminal, you cannot handle a gun for five years and if you spent more than three years in prison then you get a lifetime ban. With all of these restrictions, the U.K. only had 138 gun deaths in 2009 (Hickey).

Next, we go across the globe to the land down under, Australia. In the year 1996, a mass shooting took place at Port Arthur, killing 35 people. Following the shooting, massive gun reforms took place. They made laws that banned automatic and semi-automatic weapons and they instituted background checks and waiting periods for purchases. In the 10 years before the shooting at Port Arthur, there were 11 other mass shootings. Since Port Arthur, there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia (Hickey).

The final example is in the land of the rising sun, Japan. Japan has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Civilians are not allowed to possess handguns, automatic assault weapons, semi-automatic assault weapons, military rifles, or machine guns. They are not even allowed to touch a gun without a license. If they do want a gun then they have to go through an extensive application process. And after all of these laws what does Japan have to show, only 11 gun murders in 2008, 22 in 2007 and 2 in 2006 (Hickey). America had over 11 thousand in 2011.

Now, no one is saying to go to the lengths that Japan has but these three countries show that gun control has worked. Of course there is no guarantee that it will work here in the U.S., but we have to try.

We as a nation must do something about guns. We cannot just sit back and pretend that there is not a problem. There is a big problem with guns and ignoring it is costing lives. We cannot hear about these mass shootings like Newtown, Aurora and Virginia Tech and say that nothing needs to be done. If laws are not put in place now then when will they?

[te10]

Works Cited

Alpers, Philip and Marcus Wilson. 2013. Guns in the United States: Facts, Figures and Firearm Law.Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney. GunPolicy.org, 15 May.Accessed 06 May 2013.

Blannelberry, S.H. "The Argument Against Banning ‘High’ Capacity Magazines (VIDEO)." Guns.com. N.p., 05 Apr 2013. Web. 08 May 2013.

Burns, Larry. "A conservative case for an assault weapons ban." Los Angeles Times. N.p., 20 Dec 2012. Web. 07 May 2013.

DeLuca, Matthew. "Background checks for guns: What you need to know." U.S. News. N.p., 10 Apr 2013. Web. 04 May 2013.

Follman, Mark, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan. "US Mass Shootings, 1982-2012: Data From Mother Jones' Investigation." Mother Jones. N.p., 28 Dec 2012. Web. 06 May 2013.

Hickey, Walter. "How Australia And Other Developed Nations Have Put A Stop To Gun Violence."Business Insider. N.p., 15 Jan 1013. Web. 05 April 2013.

Hill, Edward. HOW MANY GUNS ARE IN THE UNITED STATES? Americans Own between 262 Million and 310 Million Firearms. Diss. 2013. Web.

Hoyer, Donna, and Jiaquan Xu. United States. Center of Disease Control.Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2011. Hyattsville: , 2012. Web.

Memmott, Mark. "'Arsenal' Found At Newtown Shooter's Home; Read The Police Reports." NPR. N.p., 28 Mar 2013. Web. 12 April 2013.

Plumer, Brad. "Everything you need to know about the assault weapons ban, in one post." The Washington Post. N.p., 17 Dec 2012. Web. 05 May 2013.