Dear government: Hands off our guns

By Stephanie Bassett

September 25, 2008 | Gun control is one of those issues that won't go away.

Gun control advocates have strong opinions toward their hatred of guns, but not a lot of information to back them up. Advocates usually argue that if we ban guns, access by criminals, juveniles, and other high-risk individuals will magically disappear. They also seek policy changes such as near-prohibition of non-police handgun ownership or the registration of all firearm owners or firearms. They assert that there is no constitutional barrier to such measures and no significant social costs. Basically, advocates want to take away our precious guns and give them to our government for "safe keeping."

We're not buying it.

Guns are a now essential part to our society. Gun control is not necessary and can actually lead to disaster. Unfortunately, federal policies will not keep firearms out of the hands of high-risk people. If criminals cannot buy guns here in the U.S., they will find their guns somewhere else and just bring them back to terrorize us. The only difference is law-abiding citizens, like us, will not have guns to protect ourselves, and that is where big problems can occur. Widespread gun ownership is one of the best deterrents to crime.

Another reason we should be allowed guns is because it is our right as Americans as written in the Second Amendment. Of course, guns need to be sold legally so we can possibly lower the numbers of crazies that buy guns, but law-abiding citizens should never be told they cannot buy a gun to defend their families. We are even willing to register our guns so the government and law enforcement will know how many we posses and what kind we have, so that when a crime does occur, it is easier to track. However, we are not OK with them taking our guns away from us in any circumstance.

The point is crimes would actually increase if we outlawed guns. Criminals would quickly figure out that most average unarmed citizens can be overwhelmed by even a small group of criminals. We would see a rise in crimes such as assaults and rapes, because a group of criminals would have the advantage with their numbers and they would have guns, unlike us. We'd also see other crimes increasing such as car-jacking, home invasions, gang robberies on buses or subways and so on, because the criminals would be secure in knowing that few citizens would be able to stop them.

The United States could be quite the scary place without us citizens able to own guns and frankly, we do not want to see it get to this point. We want to feel safe in our homes and know that we can defend them when trouble knocks at our door. There is a lot of truth to this quote from an unknown source, "When guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns."

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MS