Toby Crabtree AICE student number: 2567 Center US015 Word count: 1856 Does gun ownership make society safer? Humanity has been using guns for decades now. Guns have been utilized for many reasons. Hunters use guns to bring home food to keep their families from starving. Soldiers use guns to protect their country and those that live there. Police officers use guns to enforce the law and to protect civilians against anyone who may want to harm them. Everyday people may even use guns to protect themselves from criminals who attack those they feel would make an easy target. Some people use guns for recreation and only fire them at target ranges simply for fun. However, guns can be used in much more sinister ways as well. Gun ownership is …show more content…
Ryan McMaken writes about how gun control is not the proper way to deal with gun control in his article “Gun Control Fails: What Happened in England, Ireland, and Canada.” McMaken writes both about how the homicide rates between countries may be askew and about how gun control has failed to affect crime rates in countries that strictly enforce it. McMaken writes about how different countries track homicide rates and how these different collection rates skew the results and if all the countries collected these numbers in the same way the comparisons would be much different. McMaken states, “there is always a fundamental problem with comparing different countries that may employ different methods of collecting data on homicides and processing the data” (McMaken 2). McMaken goes on to explain what the homicide rate would look like in the United States if it were collected in the same way that other countries did. “In 2012, the US murder rate was 4.7 per 100,000... Using only people who were arrested (not just convicted) would lower the US murder rate to 2.26 per 100,000.” (McMaken 4) In this same article McMaken talks about another issue, gun control, McMaken claims that it doesn’t work. McMaken shows several graphs and charts representing the homicide rates of different countries through the years and he marks on the graphs when certain gun laws were enacted or disbanded. The first countries McMaken talks about are England and Wales. McMaken shines some light on the gun laws in England by saying, “The United Kingdom is often held up as evidence of the effectiveness of gun control. After all, since 1920, the UK has experienced increasingly restrictive gun control, leading up to an almost-total ban on handguns, and even many shotguns.” (McMaken 10) McMaken follows up this statement with a shocking fact, “And yet, the homicide rate increased for years after gun confiscation was put into