Assignment Task
Jeremy Yusufov
Mr. Giugliano
St. John’s First Year English Writing
November 16, 2021
Editorial
Imagine you hear a loud noise outside your room at 2:00 am. You go outside to check it out, but you see a burglar with a gun in your house. Bang! Bang! You’re dead. Now a baseball bat or a knife won’t do much when a person with a gun is facing you. Luckily, the New York State government allows New York City residents to keep a firearm in the house. Now, imagine you’re walking outside, tired, trying to get home. All of a sudden a guy with a weapon pops out, robs you, and kills you. Now if that person has a gun, chances are there is nothing you can do unless you have a gun. In that case, you’re out of luck.
Gun laws you can find across almost all the states require that citizens and legal residents must be at least 18 years of age to purchase shotguns or rifles and ammunition. All other firearms can only be sold to citizens 21 and older. In addition, you need to have a permit, which you apply to the state for. In order to get a permit, the state must conduct a background check and you will pass if you’re not a convicted felon, not under restraining orders, not convicted of domestic violence and/or drug crimes, and not committed to a mental health facility. Pretty reasonable right?
In addition to these laws, New York requires applicants living in NYC to demonstrate “proper cause,” which courts have defined as a “special or unique danger” that the general public doesn’t face to carry a gun on your person outside. That means, if you want a gun to protect yourself because you don’t live in a safe neighborhood or travel through one to get to work in NYC, you can’t get one. Now I can supply a whole levy of arguments as to why gun control laws in NYC should be relaxed, but the simplest one I can tell you is: gun control doesn’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals, it keeps guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens.
Criminals, by definition, do not obey the law. Just from this statement, we can infer gun control laws only affect law-abiding citizens who obtain firearms LEGALLY. In 2016, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, under the Obama administration, conducted a study on how prison inmates obtain their firearms which were used in crimes. The study found that only about 10.1% of the inmates received their firearms through a retail source. If you need me to spell it out for you, 90% of criminals obtain their firearms through illegal avenues. These avenues don’t care about background checks, they don’t care about special or unique dangers, and they will NEVER be stopped by state and federal laws.
Criminals may go through the legal paths and have background checks run on them, but background checks, even if they seem pretty reasonable on paper, don’t stop those who intend to use guns to commit crimes. If a criminal lies on the background check form, it won’t stop them even though it’s a federal crime. If a person with no criminal history buys a gun to use it to commit a crime a background check won’t stop them. Imagine that a person with serious mental health issues goes to buy a gun without any history of treatment or institutionalization. A background check will most likely not stop them. Just take a look at California, a state that’s had background checks in place for decades. Consider California, a state that has had background checks for decades. The study “California’s comprehensive background check and misdemeanor violence prohibition policies and firearm mortality,” which was published in 2018, examined the effect of background checks from 1981 to 2000 and found that background checks had little to no effect on homicide rates in California.
However, allowing law-abiding citizens easier access to firearms does help reduce violent crime. Gun control advocates long argued that easier access to firearms would lead to more crime. But time has told a different story. Gun ownership is up, and violent crime is down. “ Guns in America: Results of a Comprehensive National Survey on Firearms Ownership and Use” by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig and “Firearms Commerce in the United States, Annual Statistical Update 2019” by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives both tell us that from 1991 to 2019, violent crime rates dropped by more than half while the number of firearms owned by citizens doubled. Published in October 19, 2000, the study “Multiple Victim Public Shootings,” which is associated with the Crime Prevention Research Center and the University of Chicago Law School, finds that mass murderers have been stopped or deterred by citizens carrying concealed firearms multiple times.
Now that you are aware of these facts, you might be wondering if gun control even works? In reply I would say that strict gun control doesn’t. Cities with the most strict gun laws, like our very own New York City, suffer from some of the highest violent crime rates, and it showed during the pandemic. In 2020, according to “Homicides Surged in NYC in 2020,” homicides have increased by 41% and shootings have increased by 95%. Another example of a city liken this is Chicago, where murder rates increased by 50% in 2020 and has the record fir the highest gun related homicided.
If gun control doesn’t work, what can we do?What we can do is instead make it harder for citizens to get guns, we police people carrying guns illegally. This is what happened when Virginia launched the successful “Project Exile,” in 1997. With one of the highest homicide rates in Richmond Virginia, prosecutors began enforcing existing gun laws and gave people who were carrying illegal guns max sentences. The result? Richmond’s homicide rate plummeted with law enforcements taking 100’s of illegal guns off the streets.
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