Ineffective vs Effective Gun Control

    If the point of gun control is to reduce gun violence and crime rates, than politicians are targeting gun control in an ineffective manner. The majority of gun laws are emotional laws, or they are targeting a specific aspects of a gun, which has no effect on crime rates.

    Take the AK-47 for example. It is synonymous to the bad guy. When people think of the gun, most people think of terrorists and our enemies. Therefore people only view it as a bad weapon, not the tool that it is. When the AK is banned, it doesn't make sense because there are other rifles that have very similar characteristics that are not being banned simply because they don't have the same name and look as the AK. Another issue are the countless attachments or variations of weapons that are banned, which has little to no effect besides making the lives of the law abiding citizen that much harder. Look towards the 1994 Assault RIfles Ban. The results were inconclusive. It did not significantly reduce crime, nor did it increase crime. Essentially they created a law that did nothing, and only annoyed law abiding citizens. Lastly, when too many restricting gun laws are in place, a rise in gun violence may occur like what happened in Chicago.  When Chicago banned all handguns, the percent of murders with handguns increased nearly 40%. (justfacts.com) The point of the law was to decrease handgun murders, but more murders were being committed by handguns. Clearly the law was not effective. Currently the majority of the laws that are being proposed are just more nuances, that do nothing except make people feel good that they are combating gun violence.

    There is only one good argument that is being talked about right now and that is banning the selling of weapons to people on the no fly list, but even that has flaws. Some people are arbitrarily put on the no fly list. To make the law fair, citizens must have a way to appeal being on the no fly list, that way they do not have their rights stripped without due process. Another possible law would be to enforce mental health screenings every five years or so, until they age out in their elder years. Most people would pass easily and they can continue on living their lives owning guns. But it would still prevent the mentally unstable people from obtaining weapons legally. The second possible law that should be brought up, that has already been proven to work here in the United States, is Project Exile. Project Exile was a program developed to significantly decrease the amount of gun violence by making the penalties for illegal gun ownership and use much stricter in Virginia, 1997. It gave people a minimum of five years in prison when caught with an illegal firearm. It was possibly the most effective gun law ever written. It dropped firearm related murders by almost 40%.(policechiefmagazine.org) No gun ban or feature restriction has ever come that close to being that effective. It only applies to criminals, not the law abiding citizen, and criminals are the reason we need gun control. However, this law was terminated because certain politicians deemed it discriminatory towards minorities. It targets people who break the law, not people of color. If all three potential laws were to be put into place, it would have tremendous success in reducing gun violence, which is the ultimate goal of gun control.

http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=3192&issue_id=112013