Opinion: The Spoiled Amendment

Being an absolute gun lover is one of the best ways to stereotype an American. There’s videos of young kids crying tears of joy when they receive their first guns who will probably grow up to be the same people who proudly own a mass collection. But how could a country who loves firearms hate them just as much?

Recently there have been student walkouts to bring attention to gun control and many people who think guns should be banned from the public. All this controversy dates all the way back to our Second Amendment: the right to bear arms.

The times we are living in now are much more different than how our Founding Fathers lived. Back in 1789, when the Constitution was written, people didn’t have the same type of security that we do. Attacks from wild animals was an everyday struggle, and houses were a lot easier to break into. The firearms that the writers of the Constitution were thinking about, the only ones they had at their disposal, were muskets and handguns that were nowhere near as lethal as what we have today. The Founding Fathers were not imagining machine guns to be possible and therefore did not intend to allow them for public use.

Surely many gun lovers are responsible with their weaponry but there needs to be regulations on the types of weapons that are available. Choosing to ignore the problems that modern guns have presented or thinking that gun crime can be reduced with more guns is absurd and childish.

There are numerous graphs and charts that represent the almost direct correlation between guns and crimes: the more people that own guns, the more people that die. Why be so outspoken about allowing people to possess military grade weapons and upgrades when it’s those types of weapons so commonly used in mass shootings? These guns have no place in a person’s household and, if owned, should be kept elsewhere, say a firing range. Nobody needs to keep a machine gun or a shotgun inside their house, as stand-up comic Bill Burr puts it, “I can defend myself with a BB gun”.

Guns should be restricted to keep massive tragedies from happening. Nobody needs a weapon capable of unloading 30 bullets in less than ten seconds under their bed. Of course people should be able to possess a firearm for their safety but it shouldn’t exceed anything larger than a handgun. Military weapons shouldn’t be civilian weapons and anyone who would rather have a gun in exchange for a person’s life is blind.