Based on these statistics, guns must be regulated to solve these problems.
As described in the article "Public Perspectives: Public Opinions About Gun Policies- by Tom Smith, general gun control consists of three major policies that would regulate the manufacture and sale of guns. The first policy includes measures such as requiring police permits, background checks, waiting periods or licensing and registration for all gun owners. The second type of gun control, gun safety, consists of polices designed to make guns "safer and less accessible to unauthorized users such as children-(Smith 3). The third and final policy consists of measures aimed at restricting a criminal's access to guns (3). .
From 1996-1999, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) conducted a National Gun Policy Survey. The NORC assessed American's attitudes toward firearms and the regulation of firearms. Four National Gun Policy Surveys were sent out to a representative sample of 1,200 Americans asking their views on the three gun control policies. The majoritie of respondents to the NORC National Gun Policy Surveys support these types of gun control, especially in relation to handguns. In the 1999 poll, "nearly eighty-one percent of respondents supported a background check and a five-day waiting period before a handgun could be purchased; eighty percent endorsed mandatory registration of handguns; some fifty-four to fifty-eight percent wanted to ban domestic manufacture of small, easily concealed, and inexpensive' hand guns-(Smith 2). Overall, of the eleven general gun control measures that NORC asked about in 1999 the average respondent supported seven and a half (3). In general, the majority of society strongly supported gun control policies. .
The second type of gun control measure, gun safety, includes establishing federal consumer product safety standards to guns. It requires that guns be childproof and for gun owners to store their guns safely.