Indholdsfortegnelse
Amendment 2
Interpretations
Introduce the two videos:
Har de ret til at gruppere sig?
Organisation: (NRA)
10 Big Questions in the U.S. Gun Control Debate
- How Many Guns Are in the U.S.?
- What Does the Second Amendment Say?
- Is the U.S. Gun Homicide Rate Really That High?
- Are There Countries With as Many Guns as the U.S. but Less Crime?
- What's a Semi-automatic Gun?
- How Often Do Gun Owners Actually Prevent Crimes?
- How Often Are People Killed by Their Own Guns?
- Did the Federal Ban on Assault Weapons Affect Crime?
- Do States With Strict Gun Control Laws Have Less Gun Violence?
- Has American Public Opinion Shifted on Gun Control?
New Yorkers Have a Constitutional Right to Nunchucks, Judge Rules
‘I Am the “Good Guy With a Gun”’: Black Gun Owners Reject Stereotypes, Demand Respect
Protecting and serving while black
Revealing a concealed weapon during a traffic stop
Visiting a gun store or range while black
Preventing an imminent threat
Optimer dit sprog - Læs vores guide og scor topkarakter
Uddrag
The U.S. has a lot of guns — so many, in fact, that there's nearly one firearm for every person who lives in the country.
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, in 2009 there were an estimated 310 million guns in the U.S., including 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns [source: Krouse]. The 2017 U.S. population is more than 327 million.
This already huge privately held arsenal is growing at a very fast rate. In 2015, more than 9.3 million firearms were manufactured globally, and about half of those are bought by people who live in the U.S. [source: ATF].
That may lead you to the mistaken impression that everyone is packing heat. In truth, however, the majority of Americans still are unarmed.
In an October 2017 Gallup poll, for example, 42 percent of Americans said they had a gun in their homes [source: Gallup].
In fact, the number of Americans who own guns seems to be on the decline; Gallup, for example, found that the percentage who had guns in 2012 was 8 percent lower than in the mid-1990s.
Some believe that gun ownership may be decreasing because gun owners tend to be middle-aged white males, a demographic that represents a smaller segment of the population in 2013 [sources: Statistic Brain, Brennan].
But gun purchases — and gun manufacturing — are both at all-time highs. So if more guns are being sold, more people must be owning guns, right? Wrong.
It appears most of the new gun purchases appear to be by existing gun owners. In fact, a relatively small number of heavily armed people own most of the country's guns.
A groundbreaking study published in 2017 by The Russell Sage Foundation half of America's gun stock (approximately 130 million guns) is owned by approximately 14 percent of gun owners [source: Azrael, et al].
---
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states the following: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
But what that means is the subject of intense debate. Pro-gun partisans argue that the Constitution's framers guaranteed peoples' right to possess and carry just about any sort of firearm.
Gun control advocates say it was intended to allow states to maintain the equivalent of today's National Guard units [source: Krouse].
But as Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes once noted, "The Constitution is what the judges say it is" [source: Columbia University].
And so far, probably to both sides' frustration, the courts have never fully defined the Second Amendment and its implications. Instead, the U.S.
Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings that mostly have upheld the government's authority to impose restrictions upon weapons.
For example, in the 1937 case U.S. v. Miller, a court upheld a federal statute requiring licensing of sawed-off shotguns, saying that some types of weaponry weren't needed by a militia and thus weren't constitutionally protected.
(Gun rights advocates replied that this type of weapon had been used by militia before.) More recently, in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the court found that citizens did have a right to possess handguns at home for self-defense.
But the justices said the government still could impose other limits — such as banning criminals and those with mentally illness from owning guns, regulating gun sales, and barring guns from schools and other places [source: Krouse].
---
In 2014, the latest year statistics were available, 11,961 people were killed by murder in the United States — 8, 214 were by firearm [source: FBI].
Whether that rate seems high to you depends upon your perspective. The U.S. isn't the country with the most gun murders, by any stretch — that would be the tiny Central American nation of Honduras, which had 74.6 gun killings per 100,000 people in 2014.
And there are a bunch of other countries with higher rates than the U.S., such as El Salvador, Venezuela, Jamaica and South Africa [source: Keng Kuek Ser].
But those places tend to be developing countries where law and order is weak, or places with political unrest.
Compared to other industrialized democracies, the U.S. gun homicide rate is through the roof. It's more than 12 times the rate in Italy, seven times that of Canada and about 30 times the gun homicide rate in Great Britain or France [source: Fox].
So here's another question: Would the crime rate in the U.S. be lower if there were fewer guns available? Again it depends on which study you consult.
Burglary and assault rates were higher in Britain in 2012 than in the U.S., but homicide rates were much lower [source: Civitas Crime]. The U.N.
Global Study on Homicide (by any weapon) put the British homicide rate at 1.2 per 100,000 while the U.S. rate was 4.6 per 100,000 [source: UNODC].
"While the specific relationship between firearm availability and homicide is complex, it appears that a vicious circle connects firearm availability and higher homicide levels," the study explains.
Skriv et svar