What Do Others Do?

How do we, the people of the United States, figure what types of gun restrictions are best for us? One easy way, is to see what other countries have done. We will take a look at where a few countries have succeeded, and where a few have failed.

In the United Kingdom, they very strict gun restrictions. The process to get a permit is a lengthy one. All military style and fully automatic weapons are banned from civilian use, along with a few other restrictions. About 90% of the population in London is unarmed. Sounds peaceful right? But the back draw to this is that crime rates have risen in double digits percent wise in the UK: 26% knife crimes, 27% Firearm crimes, and 19% in violent crimes over all. According to statistics from The Telegraph, London is a more dangerous place than New York. so from this we learn that making it harder for people to access guns won’t make things any better.

Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in all of the world, in a country of 127 million people they only have about ten gun deaths a year. Background checks are more extensive in Japan than the U.S. To own a weapon, a person must take an all day gun safety class, mental health evaluation, pass a written test, shoot with 95% accuracy, and have a legitimate reason for owning one. The only weapons that the Japanese allow their civilians to are shotguns, competition guns, industrial, and air guns.

An Armed Issue

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This one simple statement form our own U.S. Constitution has caused us a lot a grief and confusion. People fight and argue constantly over what hidden meanings are within the second Amendment, trying to figure out what the founding fathers meant to say. The main confusion lies in what should be the laws in regulating the ownership of guns. That is I plan to figure out.

These days in 2019, we have an abundance of laws concerning the rights and regulations of gun ownership. In these laws there are a various number of thing: how much ammunition the weapon can hold, whether the weapon is fully automatic or not, what type of accessories you can attach to your weapon, and how to “properly” store them. What I wish to do is figure out which laws in our nation are truly necessary for public safety, and which ones are just a false sense of security for the public eye.

The broader and simplistic issue of this entire ordeal is that should firearms be banned from public use, or should we we simply drop all restrictions and just let the people buy and do what they want with them? I am not in favor of either opinion, but somewhere in between. I don’t wish for guns to be banned and I know that it would be folly to no restrictions at all. That’s what got me interested in this project, I wished to figure out a happy medium between the two ideas.