What Does America Need to Fix the Gun Control Problem?

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                Pulis

Tamara Pulis

Tim Wall

English 1213

29 March 2005

What Does America Need to Fix the Gun Control Problem?

        Gun control is hardly a new issue in America, much less in American politics.  Ownership of guns is extraordinarily widespread in the United States, and has been for some time.  Since the late 1950s, the share of American households reporting at least one firearm has remained fairly constant at just under 50 percent (Gun Control Debate 959).  This shift in the character of ownership has taken place against a complicated legal backdrop, the basic feature of which at the federal level is the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the Brady Crime Prevention Act passed in 1994 (Cohen).  Far outnumbering federal regulations are the various local and state laws that have long been the principal source of firearm control in the United States.  People for gun control think that the best way to fix the current gun control situation is to focus on the design and manufacturing aspect, to close the “gun show loophole”, and to start a National System of Registration and Licensing.

For proponents of gun control, any solution to America’s gun problem must be national in scope.  One broad set of remedies proposed in recent years, and pursued both on Capitol Hill and through lawsuits against the firearms industry, has focused on design and manufacturer.  Under these supply side measures, gun makers would be required, among other things, to stop producing cheap, smaller handguns, typical known as “Saturday Night Specials” and to add various safety features to their other handguns, from trigger locks meant for the protection of children to “smart” technology that when fully developed, would allow a weapon to be fired only by an authorized user (“Gun Control Debate” 958).  Anti-gun control activists believe that it would be easier to control the manufacturers and what they produce than to try to control the people buying the guns. Manufacturers may become more motivated as they start losing lawsuits that find the manufacturers negligent, causing them to pay millions of dollars in damages.  Judges are concluding that the manufacturers “knew or should have known that their guns can operate in a reckless or incompetent manner (“Do Guns Mean Crime?”).”

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        As for the demand side of the equation, gun-control groups have called for new laws that would place further barriers in the path of criminals and other people prohibited from buying firearms.  At the top of this list, particularly after investigators discovered where the weapons used in the Columbine massacre were obtained, has been closing the “gun show loophole” (Williams).  As it stands now, there are more than 4,000 such events held each year where private collectors and hobbyists do not have to run background checks on potential buyers and as a result, they have become a key source from ...

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