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Friday, February 8, 2013

Gun Control and How Teens Think

The follow essay was written by my seventeen year old son. He wrote it without any input from me, but I assume he has been influenced by being around me.
We live in a rural area of the North Georgia mountains, where most of his friends and parents of his friend are either hunters or own some sort of fire arm.
This was for a project in school, I don't know what kind of grade he got, but I think he got it mostly right, regardless of what you hear from the white house. If we have more seniors in high school that can actually think for themselves, we still may hope.
I just cut and pasted his word file, with his permission, with no revision.



Gun control is a very controversial topic in America at this point in time. It was never really made a big deal out of until the Sandy Hook shootings, but shootings have never been a good thing obviously. Basically what I have gathered from the poll research is that something tragic has to happen to make people believe a certain thing, which has been evident in the past with things such as the Watergate scandal and the Iran – Contra scandal. The fifth poll that said, “Have you done any research on gun control laws after the Sandy Hook incident”, which I believe is trying to imply that it takes something like that to make a nation of people more concerned. If the question had been asked “How much research on gun control had you done before the Sandy Hook incident?”, then I guarantee there would not have been close to the reported 69 percent.
            The second conclusion I have come to is that most people do not do research on most things anyway. By “things” I mainly mean in terms of these gun bans proposed by Obama. The automatic rifle ban would possibly be one of the least effective bills passed. One reason is that convicted criminals and people that want to get weapons and kill people are going to do it no matter what a law says, they aren’t planning on following the laws anyway obviously. Secondly due to the fact that nearly 23 percent more people are killed by cigarette smoke, why would we propose a law banning assault rifles when more people are committing suicide smoking. Third, it is not usually assault rifles that are used in most shooting incidents, it is handguns. Making a ban on handguns would be way more effective than assault rifles, but like I said earlier criminals aren’t going to follow any rules anyway. I think things should maybe be a bit stricter on the security and self defense end, such as letting teachers or at least one faculty member keep a concealed weapon, but I do not believe bans will change much.
            I do in fact believe that gun control could change an election outcome in the future. If a president says they want to take away gun rights they will probably lose a good bit of their voters. In most polls way more people supported more gun rights than less, usually a good majority at least. If a presidential candidate wants to try and do it they will probably lose unless they have a really good argument.