Gun
control has been a major issue in the United States over the past 20 years. With school shootings and street gun
violence statistics going up, it’s time for our government to make a
change. The recent school shooting
in Oregon at the Umpqua Community College has sparked a serious desire for
change among the Democrats in Congress.
The Senate Democrats have created a program and they are going to begin
to promote and push it through Congress this week but their biggest problem is
the Republicans. Harry Reid, the
Democratic majority leader, has called the Republicans “puppets of NRA” and he
sees them as the biggest obstacle they'll face.
Other
officials, like Hilary Clinton and President Obama have also urged for new gun
control laws since the time of the Oregon shooting. The problem that many members of Congress and also American
citizens are seeing is that all of these people in power are not offering up
any solutions but merely saying that we need a solution. The one thing that Obama has mentioned
is that he wants to use his power to its full capacity so that he may put
background checks into play.
Background checks would be made a crucial part of the gun purchasing
process if Obama gets what he wants.
As
a current college student and a political science student I understand that it
is hard to find the balance between letting people take full advantage of their
Second Amendment rights and keeping Americans safe. The Second Amendment is “The right to bear arms.” The issue with this is that yes, you
should have the right to own a gun BUT I agree that we should have background checks in
place to make sure that these guns don’t fall into the wrong hands. Republicans though, are not willing to
think about the fact that their fellow Americans will be stripped of their
Second Amendment rights. What they
need to think about is that they are misunderstanding what the Second Amendment's
meaning truly was at the time it was created. The real meaning of the Second Amendment is one that does
not really stand anymore in our world today.
Government officials should really start thinking of solutions for these
school shootings and start to tighten up the restrictions on guns in
America.
2 comments:
What really upsets me about the gun control debate are the recent comments by Ben Carson and those that are defending him. If you haven't heard, Carson claimed that gun control in Nazi Germany helped cause the Holocaust, that if Jews had guns they could have prevented the mass genocide. I have a major problem with this first because of the ridiculousness of the statement. Carson is saying that the Nazis would have been stopped by citizens owning firearms even though the combined forces of several of the greatest armies in the world could barely stop them. But it's disturbing mainly that someone like Ben Carson can say something like this and not suffer at all in the polls. At some point, gun control legislation is going to happen. But if Ben Carson can still be a frontrunner for president, it won't happen anytime soon.
It seems that gun control debates gain in popularity after a major tragedy, such as the recent school shooting, and then die back down once the shock wears off. Congress has been trying to reach a decision on how to go about gun control for far too long, and as they argue, more and more people die in crimes that could have possibly been prevented. It is not helpful to talk about the tragedies of guns if we do not talk about ways to end them. While it is important that the amendments to the Constitution are protected, it is also important that the citizens in which the Constitution aims to protect are kept safe as well. A balance needs to be found- and quickly.
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