The Pros And Cons Of Assault Weapons

On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock, a former real estate investor, shot and killed 58 and injured an additional 422 at a concert in Las Vegas. His weapons of choice? 22 different assault rifles (Standard Reports). Assault rifles like Paddock’s are fairly easy to buy in our current society; you just have to have a driver’s license, a background check, and a proof of sale document. Not only are assault rifles easy to buy, there are a large amount of them, more than three million to be exact (Zremski). Considering their lethality and the sheer amount of heavy weapons such as assault rifles in just the United States, they should not be available to Americans. Although assault rifles are not particularly the most common type of weapon, out of the over 300 million in the United States, they do make up a good percent of them (Everitt and Pratt). However, when you look at the percentage of gun violence

Jerry Zremski of the Buffalo News reported that are more than three million AR-15s in the United States alone and they retail for about $1,500 each. If one does the math, that creates a $5 billion industry if you only consider the assault weapons in America. Since the market for heavy weapons like assault rifles has such a huge market, a large amount of citizens are employed to run this industry, more than 263,000 to be precise (Popken). With more than a quarter of a million people employed by one business, trying to shut it down would be virtually impossible when it creates as much money and jobs as it does. For that very reason, making so many jobs and so much money, is why the federal government will not try to change anything about the gun control problem in America. However, there is another problem about assault rifles that plagues our country: the statistical amount of injury caused by the heavy