Lindsey Hickman
September 1, 2013
PHI 103 Informal Logic
Instructor: George Greaves
All law-abiding adults should have the right to own a gun, however there are very legitimate reasons to maintain restrictions for gun ownership. Once a citizen has been convicted of a violent crime, rights should be stripped. Current, legitimate, California gun restrictions include age, criminal history, and the number of rounds a magazine for an assault rifle can hold. Current regulations are legitimate for safety.
Though the innate Right to gun ownership has long been debated, the second Amendment right to self-protection and defense of liberty should be granted to all those eligible including everyone of legal age, and those who are not violent criminals.
The Constitution lends debatable answer to the right to gun ownership. The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: "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." Such language has created considerable debate regarding the Amendment's intended scope. On the one hand, some believe that the Amendment's phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" creates an individual constitutional right for citizens of the United States. Under this "individual right theory," the United States Constitution restricts legislative bodies from prohibiting firearm possession, or at the very least, the Amendment renders prohibitory and restrictive regulation presumptively unconstitutional. On the other hand, some scholars point to the prefatory language "a well regulated Militia" to argue that the Framers intended only to restrict Congress from legislating away a state's right to self-defense (Cornell Law, 2013).
“Militia” is defined in Section 10 of the United States Code 311, written by the federal government as “All able-bodied males at least 17 years of age…and under 45 years of age who are or have made a declaration to become a citizen of the United States." Additionally, another provision allows for a "reserve militia" (as opposed to the "ready militia" described above), that includes women, children and the elderly” (SAF, 2010).
Current California legislation on gun restrictions including but certainly not limited to: applicants must be 18-years old to purchase long guns, 21-years old to purchase pistols; must have never been convicted of a felony; certain types of magazines are restricted. There is also a 10-day waiting period after a successful background check has been completed.
Arguments against gun restrictions are supported by the Nation Rifle Association(NRA), and people who feel that gun ownership is their right as free citizens. Guns are used for hunting and self-protection. Anti-restriction supporters say that very few violent crimes are committed with registered, legal guns.
Critics of gun ownership often argue that a gun in the closet to protect against burglars will most likely be used to shoot a spouse in a moment of rage. They say that banning handgun possession only for those with criminal records will “fail to protect us from the most likely source of handgun murder: ordinary citizens. That most gun related homicides are the result of impulsive actions taken by individuals who have little or no criminal background or who are known to the victims. That the majority of firearm homicides occur, not as the result of criminal activity, but because of arguments between people who know each other. Insofar as studies focus on perpetrators, they show that neither a majority, nor many, nor virtually any murderers are ordinary law abiding citizens. Rather, almost all murderers are extremely aberrant individuals with life histories of violence, psychopathology, substance abuse, and other dangerous behaviors (Kates, 2011).
An example of a document fallacious argument made by multiple media outlets reports states with strict gun-control laws have less gun-related deaths. A Washington Post op-ed by Ezra Klein and a New York Times house editorial both affirmed that states with strict gun-control laws have less gun-related deaths. To support this claim, both cite an analysis by Richard Florida in The Atlantic (Agresti, 2012).
The first problem with this analysis is that it characterizes states as having “stricter gun control legislation” if they have one of three gun laws in place: “assault weapons’ bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements.” Since trigger locks are a type of safe-storage requirement, this boils down to only two laws. By using this arbitrary method to identify states with strict gun control laws, more than half the states that meet this standard turn out to be right-to-carry states, which as a rule permit citizens to carry concealed firearms in public. Second, even if we blindly accept such a haphazard classification system, the result of the analysis is meaningless because it measures only firearm deaths instead of all deaths (Agresti, 2012).
Hence, it accounts for murders committed with guns but fails to account for lives saved with guns. The analysis also labors under an implicit assumption that suicides committed with guns would not be committed by any means simply because an assault weapons ban or safe storage law were not in place.
This is questionable given that an analysis of firearms studies published in 2005 by the National Academies of Science concludes, some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet seen shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population (Agresti, 2012).
Guns don’t kill people, bad people with guns kill people. Statistics prove that gun control supporters use fallacious arguments to scare citizens into supporting stricter limits on gun ownership. Reports prove that people don’t arbitrarily become murders, so making it more difficult for law abiding citizens to legally buy guns will not affect a criminal’s desire to get a hold of one. If a person is willing to shoot a person, they are clearly not law fearing in the first place, so tighter control on guns will no keep them from getting one. If a citizen is within the legal age, has a non-violent past, then he should have the right to gun ownership. If a citizen is not within the legal age and has a violent criminal history, he should be subject to gun ownership restrictions.
References
Agresti, James D. (July 31, 2012) Five fallacies about guns and violence. Retrieved on August 12, 2013 from http://www.justfactsdaily.com/five-fallacies-about-guns- and-violence
Cornell University Law School (2013). Second Amendment. Retrieved on August 12,
2013 from http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/second_amendment
Kates, Don (2011) Harvard Law: Would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide? Retrieved on August 12, 2013 fromhttp://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.p df
Mosser, K. (2011). An introduction to logic. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
SAF (2010). A Quick Primer on the Second Amendment. Retrieved on August 12, 2013 from http://www.saf.org/?p=gunrights_faq#6
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