The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution provides the people of the United States of America with the right to bear arms. While we have the right to have firearms still, the government has passed a lot of legislation that limits the people's rights to firearms. This has split the country into two sides, some calling for gun control legislation, and the others asking for the legislation to be stripped. Placing limits on people's rights to bear arms is blatantly against the second amendment of the Constitution; therefore almost all limits on guns should be taken away.
Gun control laws have been around for about 200 years now and are at their most controversial right now. Some of the first were concealed gun laws passed in 1813 in the Southwest (Cramer and Burnett 7). "They were part of a broad and generally futile attempt to suppress dueling. As with many social problems, legislating contrary to the popular morality of the society only shifted the problem from dueling to brawling-it did not solve it" (Cramer and Burnett 7). Possibly the most important law though, is the Gun Control Act of 1968. The Gun Control Act of 1968 made it illegal for millions of people to buy guns. Some examples of people who can no longer buy guns due to this law are people under eighteen without written consent from a parent or guardian, a convicted felon, someone who is guilty of domestic violence, and many more (Zimring 1). While some of these seem like they are good and that these people should not have guns, this is restricting a constitutional amendment and this could create a slippery slope where people's rights can be taken away. Glenn Harlan Reynolds once said, "if one 'right of the people' could be held not to apply to individuals, then so could others"( Reynolds 1). It also made for restrictions on what types of guns can be imported into the United States. This made it so that the government controls what kind of guns you could buy at the stores (Zimring 1).