Gun violence and regulation is a hot topic of today, especially with it being an election year, and I think it is very important to know what the best solution is to the seemingly ever increasing amount of gun violence. This question will effect me, as well as every other American citizen, and even those who aren't citizens but are just visiting the US. It deals with the safety of the world we live in, and if lawmakers make the wrong choice, I believe that world will get more dangerous, not less. Personally, I've grown up around guns. I learned to shoot at a very young age, which taught me to respect firearms for what they can do. I believe I have the credibility to speak on this subject because of my somewhat vast firearm experience, which includes being shot by accident by someone being careless. This incident proved to reaffirm my understanding of the amount of respect warranted by firearms. 

In order to answer my research question, I will discuss the following three sources. The first source is from "americangunfacts.com," and it states that in America every year, "guns are used over 80x more often to protect a life than to take one" (AmericanGunFacts). This statistic leads people to believe that guns actually do more good than bad in everyday life. This is not hard to believe because on the news and in the mainstream media, the only stories are about when guns caused violence, not when they stopped or prevented it. According to this website, over 200,000 times a year women use guns to prevent and defend themselves from sexual abuse. Also, three out of five convicted felons say they would not bother an armed citizen. This, combined with over 270 million firearms in America making it the highest ranking nation when it comes to gun ownership, leads to the US being ranked 103rd in the world when it comes to the highest intentional homicide rates. On the issue of concealed carry, this website points out that an FBI analysis found that "states who adopted concealed carry laws reduced murders by over 8%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7%, and robberies by 3%" (americangunfacts.com). This is due to an educated, responsible population of armed citizens that can assist the police in preventing crime.

My second source is "Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and

Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private and Public Law Enforcement" by John R. Lott, Jr. and William M. Landes. In this academic paper, they discuss how few events get the same national attention that tragedies like mass shootings do. They go on to say that "In Texas and other states, multiple shooting incidents may have helped pave the way for passage of concealed handgun laws permitting law abiding citizens to carry" (Lott and Landes). These authors do not appear to have any bias one way or another, they are just citing cases of mass shootings and comparing them with gun laws. The interest at stake in this paper is to attempt to draw correlation between shootings and gun laws through past examples.

My third source is "GunViolenceArchive" which is a nonprofit corporation formed in 2013, and their mission statement is "to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun-related violence in the US" (GVA). They fact check and collect information on all related gun violence in the US each year and put it together unbiased for anyone to see. They have data on anything from officer involved shootings to home invasions and defensive uses. Along with this, GVA also has charts and graphs to show rises and falls in the gun data over time and geographical maps.

Guns are no more than a tool to carry out the will of the shooter. Whether that will is to hunt big game, protect you and your loved ones, defend this nation against those who threaten our way of life, or do the unthinkable and murder someone, the gun doesn't know, and quite frankly doesn't care. The gun does what it is prompted to do by the shooter, and I would argue that it is no more than an extension of the shooter themselves. I am a firm believer in the old saying that guns don't kill people, people do because I find tremendous truth in this. For example, if I took a loaded gun and laid it on a park bench surrounded by people, that gun will not harm a soul unless acted upon by an outside force. At the end of the day, there will always be crazy people out there that have something wrong with them who possess the desire to harm others. This is just a fact of life that has plagued our society since its creation. The only way to combat this is with an armed population of responsible citizens. For example, in the recent movie theater shooting, if some of the people in that theater would have been armed as well, they could have defended themselves and those around them, as well as killed the shooter saving countless lives. At the end of the day, which part of our population follows the laws set by our government? The responsible law-abiding ones do. My question then becomes, if the bad guys are willing to break the laws already in place, such as murder, then what makes people think that they will abide by the laws against having handguns?

