Whether it is a friend or a politician everyone has their own view about firearms. Often these views lead to arguments about gun control and what direction the United States should explore when it comes to guns. This has created an even divide of pro-gun and anti-gun beliefs in America. These strong feelings, either for guns or against them, has led to poorly informed citizens and lawmakers. To fully tackle the gun control argument one must have some knowledge about guns. Also one must be able to filter through all the mud-slinging and look only at the facts. Poor reporting and misleading claims have confused the American public about the laws regarding guns. Gun control will not create a safer environment within the United States, since it has not worked in other countries.

To start one needs to know is the difference between a fully automatic and a semi-automatic weapon. A fully automatic weapon or assault rifle can be thought of as a machine gun, pull the trigger once and the weapon will fire until there is no bullets left to feed into the chamber. A semi-automatic weapon or a rifle fires one bullet every time the trigger is pulled, meaning if the trigger is held down only one bullet will be fired until the trigger is released and pulled again. A lot of the time rifles are labeled as assault weapons. What is an assault weapon then? It is not an assault rifle because in 1986 Congress banned the possession and transfer of all assault rifles in the United States under The Firearm Owner's Protection Act of 1986 ("Federal Law on Machine Guns & Automatic Firearms" ). This means since 1986 no one in the United States is legally able to own a fully automatic weapon. An assault weapon is a made up term to describe rifles that cosmetically look like their assault rifle counterparts ("The Truth About Assault Weapons").   The difference between a fully automatic gun and a semi-automatic gun may seem to be a no brainer but many anti-gun activist and politicians have it mixed up. Don Lemon of CNN did not know the difference on air. When he was confronted he accused the other reporter of getting into semantics (YouTube).  The difference between an automatic and semi-automatic is not of semantics it is the difference between being legal and illegal. Semi-automatic weapons are perfectly legal to own and buy.

The procedure to buy a semi-automatic has been under fire from anti-gun activist for some time. A writer for the Progressive Clinic writes, "Unfortunately, the gun laws on the books in the United States are often inadequate and are rife with enough loopholes to make them ineffective (Sager)". He goes on to mention the so-called gun show loop hole as well. In reality the laws the United States have in place right now do in fact work and the gun show loophole is not what everyone thinks. No matter what state someone is in, if they try to buy a gun from federal licensed dealer that person's name is run through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System also called NICS (Kohrman and Mascia). The NICS is a division of the FBI with the power to deny anyone from receiving a weapon if the person is a felon, drug abuser, illegal alien, has a domestic restraining order against them, convicted of domestic assault, fugitive, or was dishonorably discharged from the military( Element). These checks have denied 700,000 gun sales from being made ("National Instant Criminal Background Check System"). The gun show loophole everyone has heard about absolutely does not exist. Any sale of a gun no matter at a gun show or a private store has to follow laws mentioned earlier. The only real loophole is a private sale loophole, where a person might sell their gun to a family member or a widow sells her dead husbands guns to a gun store, either way it would be nearly impossible to regulate those types of sales by the federal government (Kopel). 

Having some background knowledge of laws already being forced the issue of gun control can be addressed, or the lack thereof. After every tragic shooting the media loves to push onto the public the illusion of the United States having a gun problem. Such like that someone is twenty times more likely to be murdered in the United States then any other developed country (Fisher). These allegations are simply untrue. When the United States is compared to the world it is not even in the top 100 for homicide, with the top ten countries having near or total firearm bans (Smith). Also why do all these anti-gun articles only compare the United States to "developed" countries? In doing this it shames the American public to thinking we are the worst of the developed world and a crime-ridden place because of the lack of gun laws (McMaken).  Even if the United States is only compared to the top seventeen industrialized countries it ranks lower than twelve of them when it comes to violent crimes (Smith). 

The biggest misconception of the gun control argument is what gun control will do for the United States. A writer for Bustle writes, "More gun control laws are correlated with lower rates of violence, and vice versa. (Millstein)". Gun control laws, in fact, do not correlate with lower rates of violence. Even if relaxed gun control laws did correlate with violence, correlation does not mean causation. Correlation in simple terms means when two or more things tend to occur at the same time (Wheeler). So basically correlation between relaxed gun laws and crime means at the time of the crime there were relaxed gun control laws. So if a country or state has relaxed gun laws then all the crimes committed with a gun can be seen as correlated with the gun laws.

 Violence in this case will be separated into homicide rate and violent crimes. Countries with the strictest gun control laws across the board tend to have higher homicide rates (Smith). Not only do countries with strict gun laws have higher homicide rates the same is true when looking from state to state. The Brady Campaign is an anti-gun activist group who rated each states gun laws from A to F. An F meant the laws are weak and an A meant the laws were strong. Out of the top ten lowest homicide states seven had a rating of lower than a C (Volokh). When it comes to violent crimes, the same trend is seen. England and Australia, which have almost completely banned gun ownership, have the highest rates of robbery, sexual assault, and assault with force of the top industrialized countries (Smith).

Other countries who have enacted gun ownership bans and regulations have not seem a drop in murder and crime anti-gun activist claim.  In some cases the homicide and crime rates have risen to be much higher than rates before the ban. England passed a gun ban in 1996 (King). Since the ban England's violent crime rate has risen to being one of the worst in the European Union (Smith). The homicide rate in England shortly have the ban rose to the highest the country has ever seen. It was not until the British government flooded England with 20,000 new police officers did the homicide rate return back to the pre-ban numbers, in short the ban has not achieved anything in the years it has been in place (King). Ireland saw the same type of thing happen. Ireland banned firearms in 1972. By 1975 Ireland's homicide rate more than doubled until 2007 where the rate leveled out at a much high rate than before the ban (King).  If gun control is not effectively bring down murder and crime rates in countries, compared to the United States are significantly smaller, then how will it work in the much larger United States? Statistically the answer is it would not work. 

The notion of complete firearm bans or regulations are nearly impossible to implement within the United States. Private sale loophole being nearly impossible to contain. Also there are eighty-eight guns for every one hundred people (Reuter). At that amount there are already too many guns in circulation. The amount of money, man power, and time it would take to remove those guns would be a monumental task. Not to mention expanding and pushing people into using the black market.  Instead of focusing on new radical, unrealistic legislation the focus should be on the improvement of laws already passed.

The background check could easily be improved. Expanding it to include state records. As the law is right now states can but are not required to run their own background check, out of all fifty states only twenty-one choose to do so (Korhman and Mascia). With the state also running a background check more data about the person trying to buy a gun can be seen. The more about a person the NICS and state knows the better decision they can make on if the person is suitable to buy the gun. In short, a more complete picture about the buyer is seen. Not to mention two set of eyes looking over documents is always better than one.

Another easy improvement would be to include mental records on the background check. It is no secret that one in five adult Americans suffer from some kind of mental health ("Mental Health By the Numbers"). As logical of an idea adding mental health to the background check, some people oppose it. Sager of the Progressive Clinic believes to add mental health would be a major infringement on someone's right to privacy (Sager). To a vast amount of people, they believe they have the right to own guns. So how can Sager say that the right to privacy is more important than the right to bear arms? Even so, invasion of privacy is an understandable argument but it is not like the mental health records would be public record for everyone to see. Only the NICS, which is a part of the FBI, will see those documents. Also not every mental health situation calls for a denial of a gun purchase. Working with psychologist a list of specific disorders can be agreed upon that it would be safer for the public and that person to not be able to purchase a gun. 

In conclusion the guns the media and public fear the most are already illegal to own in the United States. No amount of gun control will create a safer environment in the United States. This is because gun control has not worked in other smaller countries. Also the amount of guns already in circulation make complete gun control unrealistic in the United States. The best solution is to find a common ground between the two sides. The common ground being the expansion of background checks. With the expansion anti-gun activist have the stricter regulation on guns that they want. While gun enthusiast do not feel like their right to bear arms is infringed upon. 

