Discussion On Gun Control And How It Is A Rarity In The US (Essay Sample)

Gun Control and Self Defense
Student Name:
Institution Affiliation:
Gun Control and Self Defense
Logically and legally, Americans own guns for the sole purpose of protection. The average use of the arms in defense remains a question of debate. In order to expound on this controversy, weapons lobby group point out that between the years 2012 and 2014 people used guns in self-defense in more than 7.5 million times while at the same time they mention 2.5 million times (Violence Policy Center, 2016). According to the National Crime and Victimization Survey of 2016, a protracted 263,500 victims of violent crime and attacks used guns for self-defense. Other researchers share the same notion. According to Hemenway and Solnick (2015), about 127 out of the total 14,000 victims assessed in their study, employed self-defense in the case of violent crime attacks. Going by these statistics, the real reason behind this controversial standoff remains the issue of profit at the expense of lives being lost unnecessarily on the streets of America. The individuals lobbying for guns in the disguise of self-defense are not honest when one looks at the statistics. In reality, guns use for self-defense is a rare occurrence in America and hence the need to abide by the law that prohibits guns possession.
The National Rifle Association categorically exacerbated earlier that, the only way someone can stop a bad guy holding a gun is for the same individual to retaliate using another weapon (Ingraham, 2015). The truth behind this notion in a real case may be far-fetched. In that, for all the noise behind gun lobby groups, the numbers of people who continue to die unnecessarily seem to be on the rise. For instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pinpointed back in 2012 that, there were 8,855 criminal gun homicides within their database. Surprisingly enough, out of this vast number of murders, they were only able to account for 258 gun killings as justifiable. The result of this conundrum is a country facing depletion due to unnecessary confusion made by those mandated to enforce the law and those who are after profits. The state can only make potential strides if its productive citizens are not killed unnecessarily or carelessly.
Other than unaccounted deaths, the threat of these private guns being stolen by someone else in a family, whether they are licensed or not, is another potential time bomb that needs to be addressed (Mindock 2016). In states with relatively tight regulation on gun ownership such as California and New Jersey, one cannot account for the total number of guns in the hands of private citizens. The prerogative may be that they fear to license their weapons because of incarceration. One fact that remains clear is that the guns are stolen, and that is why they are not licensed. A good example is a boy in Newtown who took his mother’s rifle and shot 20 children at an elementary school. According to a study by Boylan and Kates (2013), about 90 percent of guns owned by California citizens were not licensed by 2013, and the same figures are shared across other states such as Washington DC and New Jersey. In a country with more than 300 million guns in the hands of the public, the issue of safety is more of a proverbial paradox than reality.
The gun lobby group confirms that when citizens own guns, they increase their security in light of attacks and it is their constitutional right according to the Second Amendment. The truth behind this notion may not be real regarding the statistics. For instance, the group purported that self-defense behaviors occurred about 7.5 million times between 2012 and 2014. Later, they said it occurred about 2.5 million times within the same era. When other organizations such as the NCVS and the CDC analyzed the information, the truth was very alarming. NCVS indicated 263,500 cases of self-defense behaviors in victims of gun suicide and criminal attacks. Regarding the ratio between justifiable homicides to a criminal one, the NCVS worked out to one self-defense for every 37 criminal homicides. The CDC on the other hand, found out that, in 2012 suicides by gun were reported in more than 20,666 cases (Ingraham, 2015). With regards to self-defense to gun deaths, the CDC data worked out to one justifiable suicide for every 78 gun suicides. Hemenway & Solnick (2015) studied 14,000 incidents and found only 127 (0.9%) out of the total to have used self-defense...