Should Society Be Allowed to Own Guns?

Should Society be Allowed to own Guns?

In times like this when exists such organization as ISIS and terroristic attacks happen at least bimonthly in absolutely random places all over the world the question of gun ownership is particularly sensitive. To my way of thinking, society should not be allowed to own guns and use it without strict control ensured by government.

In the first place, I think it is wrong to deny that gun ownership increases a quantity of homicides across the country. To confirm this statement I compared Belarus which takes 76 position with 7.3 guns per 100 residents in the list of countries by estimated number of guns and United States of America where this number amounts to 101 guns. At the same time the research undertaken by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime showed that quantity of murders per 100000 inhabitants in Belarus amounts to 340 and in USA – 15696. The statistics speaks for itself.

It seems to me that allowed gun ownership also increases cases of mass slaughters. A terrifying example is the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when two teenagers couldn’t overcome their anger and appetite for revenge and literally planed and committed mass shooting. Or Las Vegas shooting that took place on October 1, 2017. A gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada, leaving 58 people dead and 546 injured. We don’t have such bloody episodes in history of Belarus and I strongly believe that one of the main reasons is stringent weapon control.

Of course, there are people who support the idea of firearm permit and need guns to protect themselves pointing it out as their main pro argument. For example, some Americans consider gun ownership as American tradition. If you are not armed and can’t defend yourself and yours you are in dereliction of duty, as an American. But this theory doesn’t work in our Belarusian society with its mindset.

I do understand why hunters can buy scattergun, why the police need weapons, why frontiersmen have rifles during army obligation but I’ll never understand how a civilian can use a gun in daily living. I am against gun ownership and it’s my belief that government gun control should be as strict as possible.