commonplace anaylsis thus far

Considered to be one of the most controversial Amendments of the Bill of Rights, the arguments on how to regulate and approach the second amendment have proved to be acutely polarized, yielding viewpoints that span from the minimization of gun regulation to absolute gun banishment. Those who support gun prohibition often invoke that firearms are often used in violent crimes, which is derived from the commonplace, “availability to firearms increases crime rate.” This commonplace functions to simplify complicated social issues like crime, by reducing it to a gun-based phenomenon. The origins of this commonplace typically stem from far-left democrats who tend to favor sacrificing individual liberties in order to improve social welfare. My experiences as a gun owner, as well as crime rate statistics complicate this commonplace by showing that availability to firearms has little effect on crime rate.
Crime (I will define it as murder, robbery, assault, and rape) is a chronic social issue, and has existed since the beginnings of civilization. Since that time, governments have deployed various mechanisms such as speech limitation, and weapon bans whose criminalization were aimed at curtailing crime rates. However, considering firearms are a relatively recent technology, the controversy on how to regulate them is also of recent emergence, especially in the United States. The first significant form of firearm prohibition was the NFA (National Firearms Act), which was enacted during the great depression, and was designed to curtail the purchases and abuse of “gangster weapons”, which included, machine guns, and short barreled rifles. Initially the act intended to criminalize these firearms, but Attorney General Homer Cummings deemed it unconstitutional to completely ban firearms, so instead, exorbitant taxes were imposed on these targeted weapons, and the means of legal obtainment became strenuous. Although the NFA was successful in only partially banning certain firearms (later in 1986 these weapons were criminalized), it did succeed in establishing a viewpoint, typically among people who retain leftist ideals, that certain weapons are responsible for crime. The connotation here was that, machine guns and rifles with sawed off barrels were responsible for “gangster” type crimes (murder and trafficking). This ideal was later advanced upon by other gun bans, such as the Assault Weapons Ban (AWB), which held “assault rifles” accountable for heinous battlefield crimes. Similarly to past civilizations’ efforts to curtail crime, American weapons bans such as the NFA and the AWB, have been based on scapegoats, in which “availability to firearms are directly proportional to crime rates.”
Passed into law under the Clinton Administration, the AWB banned a class of firearms, deemed “assault weapons”, which were arbitrarily defined by the bill itself, and were distinguished solely by cosmetic qualities. Those who supported this ban retained a common misconception that these weapons are used on battlefields and are used by deranged criminals to “kill policemen or go to a school or workplace to see how many victims can accumulate” (Carter). However, the guns banned under the AWB are not the same AK-47’s used on “battlefields” or “massacres”, where a myriad of men are met with a torrent of bullets. Instead, these firearms are semi-automatic versions of their full-automatic archetype, no different from typical hunting rifles save for cosmetic details. This Assault Weapons Ban was sustained by a misconception depicted by leftist politicians, who retained the commonplace, “availability to firearms increases crime rate.” With this commonplace in mind, before the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, the semi-automatic weapons ban “represented 3.57 percent of all crime guns recovered from crimes” (Feinstien). Despite these menacing weapons’ availability prior to the Assault Weapons Ban, they still only represented a fraction of all murders by firearms, not to mention total murders.
An explanation for why the AWB was so widely accepted, could be indicated by