Gun Policy in USA........Civil Rights or Politics?

Around 2:30 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, President Trump was in the study off the Oval Office when John F. Kelly, his chief of staff, arrived with news of a school shooting in Florida. Mr. Trump shook his head, according to an aide, and muttered, “Again.” On the afternoon of February 14, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in the Miami metropolitan area. Seventeen people were killed and fourteen more were taken to hospitals, making it one of the world's deadliest school massacres. The suspected perpetrator, 19-year-old Nikolas Jacob Cruz, was arrested shortly afterward and confessed, according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office. He was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Can you imagine? A 19-year-old boy named Nikolas Cruz, killing more than a dozen of people in school area from which he was banned. On the night of October 1, 2017, a gunman named Stephen Paddock, 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 851 injured. Between 10:05 and 10:15 p.m. PDT, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, fired more than 1,100 rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel. About an hour after he fired his last shot into the crowd, he was found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His motive remains unknown. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual in the United States. It reignited the debate about gun laws in the U.S., with attention focused on bump fire stocks, which Paddock used to allow his semi-automatic rifles to fire at a rate similar to that of a fully automatic weapon. This shows how critical the gun policy needs to be change in US.

As per the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, any US citizen, permanent resident or non-immigrants have “Right to keep and bear arms in the United States”. This law was in adopted on Dec 15, 1791; way before the American civil war. The law is still in place and it is the most debated topic of USA. USA is the oldest democracy of the world. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that, "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence" and limited the scope of the Second Amendment's protections to the federal government. Since the 1990s, debates regarding firearm availability and gun violence in the United States have been characterized by concerns about the right to bear arms, such as found in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the responsibility of the United States government to serve the needs of its citizens and to prevent crime and deaths.

Firearms regulation supporters say that indiscriminate or unrestricted gun rights inhibit the government from fulfilling that responsibility and causes a safety concern as assault weapons are legal. Gun rights supporters promote firearms for self-defense, hunting, sporting activities and security against tyranny. Firearms regulation advocates state that restricting and tracking gun access would result in safer communities, while gun rights advocates state that increased firearm ownership by law-abiding citizens reduces crime and assert that criminals have always had easy access to firearms.

There was a suggestion that the background check has to be done before selling any arms to anyone. In the case of Nikolas Cruz, the shop-owner called FBI for the background check and FBI didn’t found anything on Nikolas Cruz. On the basis of that, the sell was done. The same thing happened in the case of Stephen Paddock who had a clean slate on his record. The public policy debates about gun violence include discussions about firearms deaths including homicide, suicide, and unintentional deaths as well as the impact of gun ownership, criminal and legal, on gun violence outcomes. After the tragedy of Sandy Hook the majority of people including gun owners and non-gun owners wanted the government to spend more money in order to improve mental health screening and treatment, to deter gun violence in America. In 2009, there were 3.0 recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm per 100,000 inhabitants. The U.S. ranks 28 in the world for gun homicides per capita. A U.S. male aged 15–24 is 70 times more likely to be killed with a gun than their counterpart in the eight (G-8) largest industrialized nations in the world (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy, Russia). In 2015, there were 33,636 deaths due to firearms, and some claim as many as 372 mass shootings, in the U.S, while guns were used to kill about 50 people in the U.K. However, using the FBI definition of a "mass shooting" there were only 4 in the U.S. in 2015. More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year.

Within the gun politics debate, gun control and gun rights advocates disagree over the role that guns play in crime. Gun control advocates concerned about high levels of gun violence in the United States look to restrictions on gun ownership as a way to stem the violence and say that increased gun ownership leads to higher levels of crime, suicide and other negative outcomes. Gun rights groups say that a well-armed citizenry prevents crime and that making civilian ownership of firearms illegal would increase the crime rate by making law-abiding citizens vulnerable to those who choose to disregard the law. They say that more people defend themselves with a gun every year than the police arrest for violent crimes and burglary and that private citizens legally shoot almost as many criminals as public police officers do.

Studies using FBI data and Police Reports of the incidents, have found that there are approximately 1500 verified instances of firearms used in self-defence annually in the United States. Survey-based research derived from data gathered by the National Crime Victimization Survey has generated estimates that, out of roughly 5.5 million violent crime victims in the U.S. annually approximately 1.1 percent, or 55,000 used a firearm in self-defence (175,000 for the 3-year period.) When including property crimes, of the 15.5 million victims of property crimes annually found in the survey (46.5 million for 2013-2015), the NCV survey data yielded estimates that around 0.2 percent of property crime victims, or 36,000 annually (109,000 for the 3-year period) used a firearm in self-defence from the loss of property. Researchers working from the most recent NCVS data sets have found approximately 95,000 uses of a firearm in self-defence in the U.S. each year (284,000 for the years 2013-2015. In addition, the United States has the highest rate of firearm ownership than any other nation, this coincides with higher rates of homicides. For example, between 1988 and 1997, there were 233251 homicides and 68% of them were killed by guns, within the United States.

USA is one of the most established country in the world having the strongest military around the globe while directly handling all the major world issues. But it seems like that they need to focus more into their mainland issues rather that foreign policies. USA is in debt of trillions of dollars because of that and if they want to "Make America great again”; then they need to focus more on Gun policy as the rules needed to be more strict. A 19-year-old boy killing dozens of people and becoming a felon is the biggest defeat for any country and to prevent these situations, the rules must be strict and transparent.