Argumentative Essay On Gun Control

Gun Control
In light of such tragedies as the Newtown and Aurora shootings in Connecticut and Colorado, respectively, there has been a public outcry for stricter gun control laws such as a ban on assault weapons and stronger background checks. Our society has a long history quoting the second amendment’s right to bear arms as a prime example on both sides of the argument. The opposition states that we should keep the Constitution the way the framers wanted, that our “right to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” However, the supporters of gun control claim that the framers wrote the Constitution according to the time it was written and that we should evolve and amend the Constitution to reflect the current era. In the time the Constitution

An AR-15, the kind of weapon used to murder 20 children and 6 adults in the Newtown massacre, and 12 people in the theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, is a semiautomatic weapon modeled after the military’s M-16 and M4 (Goode, 2013). An assault rifle such as the AR-15, serves no purpose on our streets other than to appease gun advocates and collectors of such items. It needs to be taken into consideration what would happen if these weapons were to fall into the wrong hands. Senator Diane Feinstein is pushing for a renewal of the Assault Weapons Ban originally passed in 1994 but left to expire in 2004. This bill would prohibit the sale, manufacture, transfer, and importation of over 150 assault-style weapons, and ban the sale of large-capacity magazines with more than 10 rounds of ammunition; but excludes most handguns and more than 2,200 hunting and sporting rifles (Situation Room, 2013). “Once you have been through one of these episodes,” Feinstein states, recalling finding Supervisor Harvey Milk’s body following the assassination of him and New York Mayor George Moscone in 1978, “once you see what the crime scene is like – it isn’t like the movies. It changes your view of weapons” (Situation Room, 2013). It would seem, from Feinstein’s point of view at least, that most of those against

In the opinion of those against gun control, it was not the framer’s intention to limit gun ownership to just the militia – which is a definition wrongly translated in current days to define just the National Guard – but to every man who is qualified and able. Poe brings up the example of U.S. Justice Department attorney William B. Mateja, who insisted, when questioned, that the Second Amendment only applied to militiamen – the National Guard in our day. This is a position that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shares. “If Mateja and the ACLU are correct,” Poe states, “then the gun rights of individual Americans would be exactly the same with or without the Second Amendment. Either way, they would be nonexistent” (p.142-143). The intentions of the framers is a notable question to ask. Why would they include the Second Amendment if it wasn’t needed? The right for a National Guard to bear arms is a natural right and isn’t necessarily one that needs to be written down to be guaranteed. How else would the Guard defend and protect our country against those who want to harm us if not with weapons? The term “militia” is meant to mean able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and sixty who are capable and required to bear arms (Poe, 2001, p. 145); this implies that the amendment has been wrongly translated by Mateja, the ACLU,