Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a robbery taking place. You do not know how big or strong this person is and you do not know what type of weapon they have. Do they have a baseball bat, a knife, or do they have a gun? Now you are a mostly a law abiding citizen, except for a few speeding tickets, but those tickets are the reason that you were denied to have purchased a firearm. So you are stuck in your home with a robber and no way to defend yourself all because the gun laws are so strict that you can not practice your 2nd amendment right. The only thing you can do is wait for the cops to show up and pray that the criminal will not find you. Now imagine this same situation but instead the gun laws were less strict and you were able to have a firearm. How do you feel now? You would feel more powerful and you would go and defend yourself and your home from this unwanted criminal. You would yell at them to get out of your house and if they do not move, you start pulling that trigger. This is what happens when you have strict gun laws, you are left undefended and cannot protect yourself, others, and your home. I stand against gun control because it has never positively impacted the crime rate, it only affects law abiding citizens, and the “steel” is not the cause of deaths.

Crime rates in strict gun law zones have risen dramatically. Lets look at cities like Chicago or Detroit having some of the worst crime rates in the country. We can also look at California, where there was just a mass shooting this past year. What is one thing that these three states have in common? They all have strict gun laws. In the first three months of 2015 Chicago experienced a 40% increase in shootings and a 29% increase in homicides. That number would be 11% of the total shootings that happened in the USA in 2015, and yet we think gun control is supposed to “stop” or “slow down” shootings (Madhani). If gun control doesn’t work in Chicago it must work somewhere else, so let's take a look at Detroit for a little bit. In the year 2015, Detroit reclaimed its spot at the top of the list for most dangerous city in the US. They have been claiming this rank for a couple of years now. In the first three months of 2015, just like Chicago, Detroit saw a 25% increase in gun homicides (Felton). For being a city not allowing guns you would think that the crime rates would go down every year. The logic for this is that if you don’t allow gun sales then there won’t be guns, this is false. Criminals are criminals for a reason, they don’t legally purchase their firearms, they get them off the black market. So what gun control does is just make it more difficult for normal  law abiding citizens to purchase a firearm.

Gun control makes it more difficult for a law abiding citizen to purchase a firearm. If you lived in a city with some of the highest crime rates, wouldn’t you feel vulnerable if you had no way to defend yourself. Lets look at other countries that had gun control like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Britain. We all know what happened in Germany and Russia but what about Britain. In Britain, as soon as the strict gun laws came into effect they saw a dramatic rise in homicides by firearms, this is because criminals knew that nobody would be able to fight back. Here is the logic behind it. Before gun control it was easy for everybody to get guns, now this includes some criminals but not all, it mainly made it easy for law abiding citizens to purchase firearms. This made criminals uneasy since anybody could be carrying a weapon at anytime and made it more of a risk for them. After gun control law abiding citizens followed the laws and didn’t purchase firearms, but the criminals just went to the black market and bought weapons illegally. So now we have a criminal with a gun and an innocent bystander without. This simply makes it easier for the criminal. The process to purchase a firearm in Detroit is a complete mess. It is stressful for both consumers and dealers. First you have to take a Pistol safety test, then they have to apply for a handgun purchase permit that only lasts 10 days. Within these ten days you have to then find and purchase a handgun that you like. This can be difficult since you have no prior feeling of how the gun works. Ten days is not a lot of time to decide. Once you purchase you have to fill out a sales record form and make sure it has a safety inspection certificate. Fail to do these things and you get a misdemeanor gun violation (Gun control facts). Which makes the law abiding citizen a criminal all because people have to blame the steel.

People like to blame the steel, they think that guns kill people so we need to get rid of them. But a gun is an inanimate object, it is a tool used for hunting, sport, and in extreme cases self defense. The problem with guns is when they get into wrong hands, but you can say that for everything. Knifes kill just as many people a year but the good that comes from a knife greatly outweighs the bad. Just like hospitals, there are many deaths caused by medical failures and miss use but yet people don’t see the bad in that they only see the good. So then why do they only see the bad in guns. Because they are scared, they don’t know how to properly use them so they think that nobody should. The lack of knowledge about firearms is the main reason people are scared and their first thing is to blame the gun.

Only 40% of Americans do or know somebody in their household that has a gun, this means that only 40% of Americans are comfortable around them.(A minority of Americans). I can see why they would be so scared of them because they don’t know how they work. They don’t realize that there are certain things to guns that prevent them from firing. For instance, all guns are equipped with a trigger safety, this prevents the user from squeezing the trigger. There are some occasions that the gun will go off even when the safety is on, that is why they put a lever in the trigger, this lever will not allow a bullet to come out even if you start dropping it on the ground. It is another safety feature that simply pull in when you squeeze the trigger. Another thing that is not as common is that the magazine has to be in for the weapon to fire but this isn’t as like for conceal and carry holders as if the magazine accidentally falls out or becomes unlatched you will not be able to defend yourself with the one bullet that would still be in the chamber.

The crime rate is increasing with predators taking out undefended prey. The good people of the cities and countries are being affected in only bad ways. All of this because our government doesn’t trust its people with some simple steel. Ronald Reagan once said “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is our problem.”(Gun control facts). With too much government and regulations things start to fall apart. If you take away the rights of the citizens then cooperation and love for the country will fall apart, and it will cause more problems than before. This is why I am against gun control.