Lastly, On December 14, 2012, 26 people were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School by Adam Lanza. The victims included 20 children and 6 adults. Adam Lanza, also shot and killed his mother and himself. These types of shootings could be prevented if we looked at toughening our gun control laws.
Our current laws are outdated and not strict enough, as they allow ordinary people the ability to acquire deadly weapons. We are still following an amendment that was adopted back in 1791 when the country was young. We are a much different country now. We are much more populous and we have more criminals on the street today. We also live in different times back then when George Washington was our President, and America was just starting out as a country. We needed the second amendment in those times to not only protect ourselves from the enemy, but to protect ourselves from our own government. That is the main purpose of the second amendment. .
When talking about gun control, one should ask several questions before changing our gun laws. The most important question we need to ask is what can we agree upon that will keep the foundations of the second amendment intact and make our gun laws stricter. .
According to an article titled Current Issues of Gun Control from the Macmillan Social Science Library that came out in 2010, The National Institute of Justice estimates that, "in the year 2006, 68 percent of murders, 42 percent of robberies, and 22 percent of aggravated assaults that were committed in the United States were committed with firearms. In that same article, According to a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University in 2010, stricter requirements on registration and licensing would prevent criminals from buying guns ". .
One way to be stricter on gun control is by being more thorough on background checks. Robert Longley, who wrote an article called History and Application of the Brady Act in 2013 says that The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, "requires all federally licensed gun dealers to conduct background checks on gun buyers and to screen out anyone who has been designated by the courts as dangerously mentally ill ".
