Argumentative Essay: Gun Control In The United States

Gun Control in the United States Gun control in the United States has become a highly contested topic recently due to the mass shootings that have occured. The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines mass murder as an murder in which four or more people are killed in one incident (Morton). Over the past decade the topic of gun control has been prevalent in new legislation because mass shootings seem more frequent. Statistics reveal that mass shootings have not become frequent over the years, but they have become deadlier with higher death tolls than ever before. The increase of the death toll can be attributed to the kinds of firearms and ammunition that civilians are able to obtain since the expiration of the Assault Weapons Ban in 2004

Countries with high rates of gun violence around the world are typically wartorn and suffer from poverty and gang epidemics that cause a high death toll. The gang violence in South American countries that are experiencing civil wars causes extremely high death per capita. The United States has high gun violence rates compared to countries around the world with similar income per person and average education level. Based on socioeconomic status, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation expects the gun violence deaths to be five times less than the actual almost four million deaths a year (Aizenman). The countries in the world that have the lowest gun death rate are Singapore and

This incident is one of the deadliest the United States has experienced as fifty eight people were killed and over five hundred were injured. The weapons used by the perpetrator, Stephen Paddock were not handguns, but instead an arsenal of machine guns. In Nevada these kinds of weapons are not hard to obtain as machine guns, just like the ones Paddock used to hurt all of the people, can be purchased in the state (Jervis). The national debate after tragedies like the mass shooting in Las Vegas is whether there will be any tragedy that will prove shocking enough to change it. After a mass shooting tragedy in Australia a law was imposed in 1996 that was similar to the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, but much more restrictive. “The Australian version avoided many of the loopholes in the U.S law: Not only did the country ban all types of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, but it also spent $500 million buying up nearly 600,000 existing guns from private owners” (Plumer). The result of the strict ban has been a decade free of mass