The Constitution is the backbone of the United States. Everything contained in the United States Constitution is supposed to be there for a specific reason. Whether it be to establish our branches of government, create an efficient voting system to elect government officials, or create laws to keep its citizens safe, the Constitution was written to make the United States of America a safe place for its citizens to enjoy the freedoms given to them. One of the most discussed portions of the Constitution, the Second Amendment, is arguably putting people in more danger than it is protecting them from. The “right to bear arms” has been a part of the United States Constitution since 1791, and many think it impossible for this amendment to be changed or removed. Gun ownership in the United States is at an all-time high. According to Kyle Becker of the Independent Review Journal, there are 112 guns for every 100 United States citizens (Becker, 1). However, more guns does not equal “more safety” or better homeland security. In fact, it may even be the exact opposite. Firearms put US citizens in danger, and the number of firearms in an area directly correlates to the number of firearm related deaths (CDC, 1). In its simplest terms, this means that if there are more guns present, more people will die. If that is the case, how can the United States population still believe that guns keep people safe and the Second Amendment should be kept as it is? Though access to guns was originally grated to keep the government from having too much power over its citizens, the United States, as well as the world, has changed, and guns now do more harm than good to those they were intended to protect. Those that end up suffering are usually innocent bystanders, such as homicide victims, victims of school shootings, or family members of those in gun-related deaths. The United States needs to implement gun control and remove guns from public access to keep its citizens safer. 

American citizens should ask themselves if having guns is a good idea, or more specifically, if the right to bear arms really keeps them safe. Before immediately jumping to research and statistics, anecdotal evidence can help introduce a topic to those who have not yet formed an opinion. The United States government has the responsibility of keeping its citizens safe, much like that of a parent’s responsibility to their children. One aspect of being a parent is rewarding good behavior or punishing bad behavior in order to create a moral sense of right and wrong in their child. Imagine a mother looking after her two sons, who are both sharing a toy truck. One of her sons is using the toy truck as it was meant to be used, driving it all around the house, stopping at imaginary stores, and even filling up the tank at imaginary gas stations. The other son, however, is not using the toy truck as intended. Instead, he takes the truck and uses it as a club to beat his little brother, making him cry and run to their mother. If this happens once or twice, the son may receive a verbal warning or a small punishment, such as a timeout, but after repeated offenses, the mother will have no other option than to take the toy away from both of her children. Even though one of the children was responsible enough to play with the toy, the other son was not, and as a result, neither of them got to play with the truck. This shows that if someone cannot use something like it is supposed to be used, they get taken away. Now expand this analogy to the United States and gun ownership. Even though a large number of people can responsibly own guns and not harm anyone else, some cannot. There have been numerous occurrences where people have showed they cannot handle the responsibility of owning a gun, and the end result is innocent people being murdered. Whether it be the Columbine shooting in 1999 (13 killed, 24 injured, 2 suicides), the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech (32 killed, 17 injured, 1 suicide), the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 (7 adults and 20 children murdered, 1 suicide), or the most recent 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, the largest mass murder in United States history (50 killed, 50 injured), the United States has shown over and over again that it cannot handle the responsibility of gun ownership, and there comes a time where the United States government needs to step in and take guns away from its citizens (Peralta, 1). People were not given the right to bear arms so they could use them as murder weapons, and the repeated misuse of guns shows that they need to be taken away for the safety of United States citizens. Like the child who played with the toy truck responsibly, responsible gun owners may think it is unfair to them that they are being punished for the misbehavior of others, but the government is responsible for the safety of all of its citizens, and the removal of guns from the American people would keep hundreds, if not thousands of Americans from death every year. 

Arguments supporting gun ownership are usually based off of hypothetical situations and countless “what if’s”. One example is an article written by Michael Bennett, the Secretary of Education under former President Ronald Reagan. He argues that the case for gun rights is stronger than ever. He presents the argument that if there were armed security or guards in schools around the nation, tragedies such as the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, would be stopped before they become out of hand and lives would be saved. “Suppose the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary who was killed lunging at the gunman was instead holding a firearm and was well trained to use it. Would the result have been different? Or suppose you had been in that school when the killer entered, would you have preferred to be armed?” (Bennett, 1). Many gun rights supporters believe that any situation can be solved by giving everyone a gun. If “good” people have guns, they can stop “bad” people with guns. In the case of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, Bennett said that the crisis could have been avoided had the principle or the school psychologist, two of the six adults killed in the massacre, been armed with a gun of their own and able to shoot back to try and stop the attack. While there is a possibility that the principle or another adult could have stopped the attack if armed, there are countless more realistic possibilities that could have taken place. The average elementary school principle is not a battle-hardened soldier. Majority are adults who have never witnessed a school shooting, never been cowering from gunfire, genuinely fearful for their lives, and never had to take a gun and return fire at someone trying to kill them. Giving staff at the school a gun does not directly correlate to stopping the shooter. No amount of practicing at the gun range can prepare an elementary school teacher for the adrenaline rush and paralyzing fear a school shooting would bring. While putting armed personal inside every school in America has a small chance to stop a school shooting, it is much more likely that the widespread panic will cause chaos inside of the school, and a teacher or faculty member engaging in a shootout with an armed assailant will only add fuel to the fire. 

Another commonly used argument to discourage gun control is the idea that if guns are completely removed from the United States, a person could still walk into a crowded area and kill dozens of people with a knife, or a similar weapon that is still legal to own. That thought-process is flawed in two ways. First, the reasoning behind the argument makes no sense. People who believe that are saying that unless crime can be completely wiped off the face of the earth, there is no point in doing anything at all to try and make a difference. Gun violence has reached a new peak, and even the smallest forms of gun control could help to lower the numbers of annual firearm related homicides from 11.1 out of every 100,000 deaths (CDC, 1). People who do not want change unless it will fix 100% of the problem are not being realistic, and small changes such as gradual gun control could help to immediately lower the total number of homicides in the United States. Secondly, research done on the lethality of both guns and knives proves that this statement is false. During a study done by the United States National Library of Medicine, the number of firearm-related injuries that resulted in deaths were recorded, and the overall mortality rate of firearm related injuries was 31.7% (USNLM, 1). A similar study was done in Folsom Prison in California, where records were kept regarding stab wounds resulting in nonfatal injuries or deaths. Cases of 270 inmate stabbings were recorded, the total number of stab wounds being more than 750 (each inmate stabbed an average of 2.78 times), and the mortality rate of the stab wounds was 3% (UC Davis, 1). Adding on to the research done in both of these studies, Charles Drew and the US National Library of Medicine did a study in Los Angeles on patients brought to the King-Drew Medical Center. Over a twelve-year period, patients with gunshot wounds or stab wounds to the chest and heart were monitored. “Of the 1109 patients, 105 had cardiac injuries…Specifically, the mortality rate of gunshot wound of the heart 24.5% and that of stab wound of the heart, 11.5%” (Drew, 1). Collectively, these three medical studies help to prove that guns are far more lethal than knives. So, even if every gun-related homicide was replaced with a similar attack involving a knife, the number of survivors would be noticeably higher almost immediately. 

Many gun advocates in the United States refuse to believe that any form of gun control could be successful. Because the right to bear arms is an amendment to the United States Constitution, they believe that it is impossible to take guns away or change the Second Amendment. Some gun supporters think that because the right to bear arms is a part of the Constitution, it is impossible to change the Second Amendment. Ironically enough, there is a way to change the Second Amendment. It’s with another amendment. The mere suggestion of an amendment to change gun laws sounds unconstitutional to some gun advocates. John Oliver, a correspondent for The Daily Show at the time, conducted interviews with some of these American gun advocates, as well as with former Australian politicians who implemented gun control into their conservative society during the late 1990’s in response to a mass shooting in a town called Port Arthur. He uses sarcasm and comedy to illustrate how ridiculous some Americans can be when they say gun control is impossible. He interviews the former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, about how he helped to draft, pass, and implement gun control legislature after the Port Arthur massacre. Many Americans think that an efficient gun control system or program would take months, maybe even years to create and put into place. When asked about his experience, former PM Howard said that it took the Australian government around 12 weeks. They created a successful gun buyback program that lead to the destruction of over 1 million firearms in less than 4 months. In the years since, gun related homicides have dropped 30-40% across all of Australia, and there have been zero mass shootings (The Daily Show. Oliver, John). 

The idea of gun control is one that scares many Americans. The United States has supported the Constitutional right to bear arms for the last 220 years, and to suggest a change after this long sounds crazy to some people. Just because something has been done the same way for an extended period of time does not make it the right thing to do. A perfect example of that from American history is slavery. Slavery was legal in the United States until 1865 with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment. At the time, people thought the idea of abolishing slavery was ridiculous. It was a practice that Americans had been using for over 100 years, so it did not make sense to some people why change was needed. As time passes, people come to realize that change can be a good thing, and just because something has been in place for a long period of time does not mean it is the right path for the future. The right to bear arms made sense in the late 1700’s, when the newly formed United States, finally free from British rule, did not want to fall back into the same way of life they had before. So, to ensure that the people could defend their freedoms if the government tried to become too powerful and take over, the people were given the right to own guns to protect themselves and their homes. Today, the same idea that guns keep us safe from a tyrannical government does not make sense. In 2017, technology has advanced beyond what anyone could have imagined. The United States government uses unmanned drones every day to perform tasks that people would have thought to be impossible 50 years ago. If the government wanted to take complete control over citizens and make the United States a police state, they could do it, regardless of the pistol and hunting rifle an everyday citizen may keep locked in their gun safe. At that point, to defend themselves, the American people would be bringing a gun to a drone fight, and that would not end well for US citizens. If the right to bear arms cannot even serve its originally intended purpose, which is to keep the American people safe from an overpowering government, and it is also one of the leading causes of death in American citizens, then the American people would be better off if gun control was implemented and guns were bought back from American citizens and destroyed. 
