OWNING GUNS IS THE AMERICAN WAY
There is in the United States a long-held tradition of possessing firearms to the extent that it is enshrined as one of the Articles of Confederation. An American citizen is by law allowed to own a gun. This dates back to the frontier history of the American states where settlers guarded themselves against Native Americans, wild animals and foreign armies. It is in the western and the southern U.S. that this tenet has the most support.
Statistics arrived at in 1995 by a branch of the American government indicates that there were 223 million firearms in the country. In 2005 almost 18% of U.S. households possessed a hand gun compared to only 3% of Canadian households. A study done in 2011 had 34% of American adults who personally owned a gun, 46% of adult men and 23% of adult women. As well, in 2011 it was shown that 47% of the adult U.S. population lived in a gun household. Guns appear frequently in contemporary culture, such as television, movies, magazines and books. The passion for hunting in the U.S. is very strong and stems from the time that the U.S. was an agrarian society and hunting provided an auxiliary source of food.
Prior to the American Revolution the American states’ governments did not have a standing army, or the ability to maintain one. The armed citizen soldier maintained this responsibility.
Americans asked their leaders something very basic: to help change the fact that we have become ridiculously vulnerable to gun violence, includng rapid-fire weapons and bullets designed to cause maximum damage. Every year the massacres and gun deaths and injuries continue to pile up. There is no doubt that the majority of the American people are in favour of some sort of gun control and keeping the guns out of the hands of the mentally ill and criminals. Politics remains politics. It is disheartening to learn that the members of the American Senate pay more attention to the people that provide them with the money to run their campaigns than the actual will of the American people. The American Rifle Association has threatened to defeat gun opponents.
More stringent gun-control laws are not in the future of the U.S. and it is probable that taking guns away completely to the level it exists in Canada and the rest of the world is impossible. If the Newtown, Massachusetts massacre didn’t bring change, nothing will.
