Guns, or gun control, have been a hot topic in the United States and the world. With the rate of homicides committed using guns climbing every year, it seems inevitable that an attempt to repeal the second amendment will surely happen sometime in the near future. However, there are multiple solutions that can turn the situation around for the better, certain people are always saying that completely banning the sale and ownership of all firearms will help the problem, and that there are various loopholes that people can jump through to easily get military grade weapons. This is a questionable claim as most criminals get their firearms illegally or from gun runners, which is also illegal. The point is, criminals don’t follow laws. The best plausible solution to the gun problem is to give everyone proper firearm training and have a large portion of the United States keep and take home their firearms which would be kept in a gun safe. Every legal citizen in the United States should be required to take a firearms course straight out of High School as well as being encouraged to own firearms.
   

If more people were armed with guns or carried any weapon with them and had proper training, I personally think we would all be a bit safer. The shooting that recently happened in Sutherland, Texas is one of the more recent recent shootings. Not to sound like a psychopath, but I appreciated the outcome of this shooting better than most other shootings because there was actually a counter-attacker who pursued the shooter before finally killing him with a his own gun. In this shooting there could have been a larger amount of lives saved if there were more people who were armed. It’s highly likely that the shooter would have been shot before he could get away and cause even more death and destruction.

Many times people use the argument that the United states should just outright ban guns and repeal the second amendment. “You don’t need a high capacity Assault Rifle to hunt deer, Where’s the fun in that?” is a sentence that people often say. However, many high capacity Assault Rifles are actually very popular among small game hunting ranging from rabbits to coyotes. It’s “The most capable weapon for the job.” Says Eric Mayer who is the leader of a state shooting association and the moderator of AR15hunter.

In the recent shootings in Las Vegas, the shooter, Steven Paddock, had used an AK-47 with a bump stock, which is illegal in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin. However, the modifications that were made to the weapon, such as a high capacity extended magazine are illegal in most states and were still obtained through unknown, and most likely illegal, means. I’ve said this already, but criminals do not follow laws. If some crazy person wants to commit a mass shooting, they’ll find a way and eventually commit atrocities. Some may have more difficulty obtaining firearms than other, but there are always certain ways of obtaining arms- either legally or illegally.

Looking at countries that have a similar per-capita gun ownership, such as Switzerland (Kirby, Emma Jane, 2013), there have been no notable mass shootings in recent history. Some would say that this is jumping to conclusions, but I believe that the reason that there have been significantly less shootings in Switzerland (University Of Sydney) is because a large amount of the Swiss population (30%) carries concealed weapons and a most of the population has been trained with firearms, and been around them for a long time.

The Switzerland laws could be successfully implemented in the United States. If citizens took a mandatory firearms class after a certain age or were required to do so at the end of someone’s senior year at high school more people would feel comfortable around firearms and maybe be encouraged into protecting themselves with a sidearm. Currently, there’s a certain stigma surrounding guns and firearms. They’re always seen as “scary,” and “not suitable for everyday life,” but I disagree with that. People need to learn to shake that feeling of guns being bad, because guns are actually a tool, and are only as good as their user.

Any and all gun-free-zones are too much of a target for deranged shooters. A gun free zone is essentially a giant neon flashing target for people who want to cause harm because all people within that zone are defenseless. If someone wanted to go out and kill a large amount of people, they would go the place where there would be the least amount of threats. Yet again, criminals do not follow laws and would not adhere to the restrictions on guns in the specified zones.

Looking at the way recent events have caused people’s fears to rise, it seems inevitable that the second amendment will be repealed, or attempted to be repealed, at some point in the near future with all the mass shootings happening recently, but that could just cause more problems with the mass shooters getting their firearms from gun runners. The only logical solution to the gun problem is to have everyone more comfortable around guns and make them have a mandatory firearms education class so people know how to protect themselves if events would ever make that happen.