Second Amendment Right To Bear Arms

The primary motivation behind the Second Amendment right to bear arms is for protecting one’s family and place of inhabitance. However, it remains unclear as to whether guns are really used for self-defense. Siegal et al. studies the correlation between stranger and nonstranger homicides in an effort to determine if guns are used as a means of self-defense more often than not. These studies concluded, “[o]ver the entire study period, the average proportion of firearm homicides that were committed by strangers throughout the United States was 21.9%... The average proportion of firearm homicides committed by strangers increased slightly over the study stranger firearm homicide rates ranged from 0.1 per 100 000… Average nonstranger firearm homicide …show more content…
However, due to the increasing difficulties in society today, certain individuals succumb to the pressures of life and make the ultimate decision to put end to all their troubles. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that gun ownership is quite popular among Americans and the United Sates comes in first place as the most depressed country on earth. Anestis et al. documented the results of suicides by firearms associated with various forms of regulations where their findings were “[t]est of whether the presence of a law requiring a permit to purchase handguns is associated with suicide-related outcomes. Results indicated that states that had a law in place in 2010 requiring a permit to purchase a handgun exhibited a lower rate of death by suicide, a lower rate of suicide by firearms, and a lower percentage of deaths by suicide caused by firearms relative to states without such a law” (Anestis et al., 2015, p. 2063). These laws proved to be tremendously effective in decreasing the amount of suicides by firearms “in the years immediately after implementing a law requiring a license to own handguns, both California and Maryland saw a decrease in their suicide rates whereas the United States as a whole and states that either did or did not have such laws in place throughout that time period saw a continued increase” (Anestis et al., 2015, p. 2066). On the contrary, even though the new …show more content…
Furthermore, through the events of the University of Texas shooting, it is evident the significance of arming the law-abiding citizens so that they can utilize the weapons for the precise intention they were invented for. In continuance, the vast majority of Americans take advantage of their right to possess guns and many of these households contain children. These circumstances in addition to the tragic prevalence of school shootings recently make it all the more important for children to be educated on gun safety techniques. Comparatively, although statistics propose that gun related homicides involve perpetrators who know their victims, the results fail to confirm the assaults were not self-defense. Moreover, the assault weapon bans enacted in 1994 did not affect a large proportion of violent crimes because criminals have a tendency to commit their crimes using handguns. Similarly, individuals suffering from mental impairments lack the necessary psychological requirements for making the appropriate discernment of what situations would call for the use of such a powerful and deadly weapon. However, more regulations to limit the sales of guns to the mentally ill will only affect the responsible citizens who desire to purchase guns for legal purposes. On a different