The Right to (not) Bear Arms
The second amendment is the right to
bear arms in America. People should have the right to bear arms
due to the fact that it is a way for people to have readily accessible protection if danger is in their path. Now looking at this view from a liberal's perspective and to believe this right needs to be taken away due to the recent events in America, such as the multiple school shootings and gun violence, it is easily understandable that people want this right to be gone. People are incredibly unstable and should not have access to firearms, so there are protests such as March for our Lives who oppose gun violence and want control. There are multiple points to be made about this movement to prevent the
right the bear arms.
In the varying amount of reasons why people should not be
allowed to carry guns, the one that stood out the most is the fact that people
carrying a gun are more at risk to be hurt then those without. Charles Branas, adjunct professor of epidemiology in bio-statistics and epidemiology, conducted a team at the University of Pennsylvania to analyze 677 shootings over 2.5 years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time of violence, and compared to other Philly residents of similar age, sex, and ethnicity. The team also accounted for other potentially confounding differences, such as economic status of their neighborhood. Overall, Branas's study found that people who carried guns were 4.46 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, the odds of them getting shot were even higher at a 5.45.
Another reason why people should not have the right to bear arms is that there is a unbelievably high rate of mentally unstable people in the United States alone. A study conducted in 2016, one in six people are mentally ill. That means 44.7 million people have been diagnosed with mental illness, and this rate is probably higher with all who have not been diagnosed during this time. Unfortunately, there are a lot of these people getting a hold of firearms either illegally or they have not been diagnosed with a mental illness like they should. Both state and federal laws regulate the possession of firearms by the mentally ill. The federal law: Under 18 U.S.C. § 922(d), it is unlawful for any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person "has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution."
I agree that Americans should have the right to bear arms. My father owns a gun, but he doesn't carry it on him. I've never even seen it personally, but I feel safer knowing it's under the roof than it not being there, just in case of emergency. Being that there is already one, I have no intentions of getting my own. I know if my house is in danger, I know where it is. Now about the viewpoint you used from the other side, the March. I actually didn't know that was happening until the day it was happening and one of my coworkers said something about it. Reading the information you found, I guess I never really thought about the fact that you could accidentally end up arming the same person you're defending yourself from (after thinking more about that point, I cut out the part from this comment that stated where my dad keeps his gun, never know who can see this). This topic is very hard for me. I can definitely see both sides of the argument and it makes it challenging to pick a side other than what my gut says. And what my gut says is that I'd much rather be able to protect myself than to be caught in a life threatening situation without it. Posts like this always get me thinking about the positions I take on certain topics. Great post!
ReplyDeleteWith the way things are going nowadays, I think the decision to own a gun is completely up to the person. Of course there are people who use the gun to harm others because they have bad intentions and there are people who harm themselves simply because they don’t know how to properly handle the weapon. There are also, as you said, mentally ill people that get these guns in there hands as well and can cause unintentional and intentional harm. I think a good way to solve some of these problems would be for gun shops to have some sort of assessment that can be done before people buy the gun.
ReplyDeleteI volunteered at a place where they let me sit in on these assessments done on people to test how “depressed” they were. The assessment helped to determine how likely the patients were to harm themselves or harm others. Most often the people who buy the guns to cause harm show some symptoms of depression. If people were given assessments like this maybe we’d be able to predict who is more likely to use the gun to cause harm.