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 prohibition. Those who support gun prohibition or strict gun regulations, often emphasize the danger of firearms in society, which is derived from the commonplace, “availability to firearms increases crime rate.” Depending on the ideological perception, this commonplace functions in multiple ways. Those who oppose this commonplace, primarily gun advocates, many conservatives, and libertarians, view it as a way to simplify complicated social issues like crime, by reducing it to a gun-based phenomenon. While those who retain this commonplace, typically democrats and moderate conservatives, use it to standardize (what they perceive as) agents of crime in order to establish a focal point when administering laws aimed at reducing crime and increasing public safety. The origins of this commonplace typically stem from highly concentrated urban areas, whose politicians tend to favor social welfare and safety over individual freedoms. 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 employed various mechanisms such as speech limitation, and weapon bans, which aimed to curtail crime. 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. Nevertheless, the principles, or commonplaces utilized to uphold past civilizations’ efforts to curtail crime, correlate to the principles or commonplaces used to support American efforts to curtail crime through gun bans.
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 these 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 viewpoint was later advanced upon by other gun bans, such as the Assault Weapons Ban (AWB), which held that a certain class of semi-automatic rifles, deemed “assault weapons”, were responsible for heinous “battlefield” style murders. Furthermore, the legislators and those who supported this ban anticipated that the banishment of “assault weapons” would reduce the national murder rates. Here, this anticipation demonstrates a popular mindset that “availability to firearms increases crime rate” and if availability is restricted, crime rates will decrease.
However, this was not the case. Although almost no person can deny the lethality of firearms, many people, including gun advocates, many conservatives, and libertarians do refute the AWB and similar government gun bans’ commonplace that “availability to firearms increases crime rate.” The basis of this refutation is often derived from statistics produced by the gun bans themselves. They site that before the AWB was initiated in 1994, “assualt weapons” “represented 3.57 percent of all crime guns recovered from crimes” (Feinstien). And since the AWB was lifted in 2004, allowing five years for “assualt weapons” to circulate amongst the people, “the nation’s murder rate is at a 43-year low” (NRA). Despite these weapons’ availability prior to and subsequent to the Assault Weapons Ban, their effect on crime and murder in the U.S., can be considered negligible.
An explanation for why the AWB was so widely accepted, could be indicated by