Addressing Handgun Control Essay Research Paper Good

Addressing Handgun Control Essay, Research Paper

Good forenoon ladies and gentlemen! I foremost want to thank you for your involvement in forming your communities for gun control. Before you begin to form for gun control, you should hold a basic apprehension of the dimensions of this issue. Many members of bing groups believe that gun control is a alone issue, one that invokes even more emotional, gut-level responses than other controversial topics such as abortion or school busing. You may or may non happen this to be true, but you should near the occupation in front prepared for a broad scope of responses, runing from apathy to detest mail and decease menaces. To derive protagonists for gun control, it is non plenty to simply present data- even information back uping merely the mildest signifier of control. Acceptance for any signifier of control does non rest merely on proficient statements about effectivity ; instead, places on the issue are influenced to a great extent by values and personal belief systems. Therefore, much of our energy will be devoted to altering these attitudes and beliefs- a hard undertaking under any circumstance. When positions are linked to concerns for physical safety, they normally are unaffected by informations and information. Yet a gun control group must seek to cover with these concerns. How do we specify gun offense as a societal job? Violent offense that threatens or abuses the physical safety of its victims lies at the bosom of the offense job in America today. In bend, the usage of pieces to perpetrate offense constitutes a major part of the violent offense job. Each twelvemonth, about 85,000 American citizens die through the suicidal, homicidal, or inadvertent maltreatment of guns ; several 100s of 1000s are injured ( deliberately or by chance ) ; 100s of 1000s more are victimized by gun offenses ( Wright, Ross, Daly 1992 ) . Despite mounting grounds of handgun offenses and deceases, Americans in general and public policy shapers in peculiar have failed to hold this ever-increasing national calamity. These facts fail to decrease the increasing gun armory. Crime of all kinds impacts on a major part of the state s families. Victimization surveys show that one out of five families is victimized by offense yearly. Although violent offense per Se constitutes merely about one-tenth of all offense, the balance being belongings offenses in which firearms apparently played no function, it contributes well more than its portion to the fright of offense and to the public s sense of offense as a serious job ( Rossi, 1992 ) . Indeed, it can be argued that violent offense is the offense job and that its decrease should be a affair of the highest precedence on the enforcement and condemnable justness policy docket of the state. The line between violent and nonviolent offenses is clear in some cases but hazy and indistinct in others. Homicide, manslaughter, assault, and robbery are, by definition, clearly violent offenses in which physical injury is either inflicted or threatened. But a burglary, normally a nonviolent offense, can easy go violent if the burglar ( or his victim ) is transporting a gun. Similarly, a minor statement that would otherwise be no more serious than a perturbation of the peace can be transformed into an aggravated assault if one of the parties attempts to stress his or her positions by flourishing or utilizing a arm. The chief dimensions of the societal job of gun offense are frequently said to be the obvious effects of these features of pieces. Gun crimes do more physical harm to victims ; guns make offenses easier to perpetrate, thereby increasing the offense rate ; guns make it possible to set about larger graduated table offenses, thereby increasing the overall societal cost. Clearly, or so it is argued, if guns could someway be abolished, both the graduated table of our offense job and the physical amendss associated with offense would diminish. Major grounds for our deficiency of strong gun controls are the prolongation of the gun-culture mentally and the continuity of misconceptions about the relationship of pistol to force. Columnist Jack Anderson commented on the gun civilization in a June 26,1976, article on a survey commissioned by The Remington Arms Company: Like a gun backlashing on its proprietor, a survey funded by a elephantine pieces maker has wound up blaring the National Rifle Association In biting linguistic communication, the survey charges that the NRA rock-ribbed protagonists live in a pretend universe of sacred rights, antediluvian accomplishments and coonskins like the dwellers of Hitler s sand trap in 1945, they talk merely to themselves, reenforcing their ain positions. This pretend universe and the misconceptions on which it is based must be exposed. A group forming for pistol control must be prepared to face many myths and platitudes, including the followers: Guns Don t Kill-People Do! This clich persists, despite grounds

of strong correlation between levels of gun crime and gun ownership (both handguns and other firearms), particularly in regions of the United States where firearm ownership is the highest. In an increasing number of murders and aggravated assaults, the weapon used is a handgun, and the presence or absence of this weapon is often a critical factor in the outcome of an argument ( Crime 17). Thus, while people do in fact kill one another, the point is that they do so much more easily and readily with guns (particularly handguns) than without them. I Need a Gun for Self-Protection. In reality, the handgun is rarely effective against the burglar or robber. A burglar typically avoids confrontations by entering an unoccupied home, and a robber can surprise and overwhelm a victim before the latter can mobilize a weapon in self-defense. It is more likely that the burglar will steal any available firearms or that holdup victims will find their own weapons used against them. The Public Won t Support Gun Control. A Gallup poll in early 1995 showed that 85 percent of the Americans interviewed favored some form of control on firearms. Previous Gallup nationwide surveys in 1994 showed 67 percent support for registration of firearms, and 41 percent support for prohibition of possession of handguns (Crime 19). As advocates of gun control we see in these statistics an enormous potential for practical limitations on what gun laws can be expected to accomplish. The Constitution Guarantees the Right to Bear Arms. The second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is invoked frequently, usually out of context or only partially. The Amendment reads as follows: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall be infringed. The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted this amendment on four occasions to mean that the federal government cannot interfere with the maintenance of a state militia (qtd. in Wright, Rossi et al. 7). The amendment neither guarantees nor denies the right of individual citizens to carry guns or keep guns in their homes. How do we deal with the opposing side? Once we have assessed the emotional climate in which we are working we can then begin the task ahead. Advocates of gun control often mistake a person s opposition to a particular kind of gun control for opposition to all controls. The extent of handgun control opposition depends on upon the nature and severity of the control measures. Despite the overwhelming public sentiment favoring gun control, proponents have been loosely organized, poorly funded, and distracted by other social and political issues. Indeed, advocates of handgun controls tend to be involved in many social issues, while their opponents generally focus on the one issue. You will no doubt encounter various degrees of opposition to your efforts to control handguns. It is important to realize that individual opposition to these controls is diverse and motivated by complex believe systems. It is generally thought, for instance that people with extreme political ideologies oppose handgun controls out of fear of too much government intervention in their lives. They also may see handguns as a means of physical defense against enemies, both domestic and foreign. Members of the Black Panther Party, for instance, have carried weapons to protect themselves from what they call the white racist police , while Ku Klux Klan members have armed themselves against what they felt was a possible Jewish, Catholic, or Black uprising.Whatever the reasons for a particular individual s opposition to gun control, you must remember that most people are predisposed to espouse certain beliefs because of family training, education, and general life experiences- all of which tend to cluster around a certain defined set of values. These predispositions work through processes known as selective exposure, selective perception, and selective retention. These terms mean that individuals naturally filter out information and experiences which do not coincide with their basic beliefs about the inherent goodness or badness of an issue (qtd. in Rossi) . They are predisposed to support or oppose certain ideas and therefore seek out and collect information that verifies and reinforces their own beliefs.Thus, when you are confronting your opponents, you are dealing with strong emotional bonds to handgun ownership and individual rights that have been developed and nurtured since childhood. You probably will not be able to alter these emotional bonds, since the information selection process involved has been reinforced for years. At most, you may begin to expose your opponents to different beliefs and alternatives. We will now break for lunch and when we return we will further discuss, how to start your own gun control group within your communities.