Fire Arms

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate September 2001

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Firearms In this essay I intend to put our mind at rest about a very strong issue in modern society, guns. There have been many incidents involving guns and I think many people are undecided on the matter. There are as i'm sure you know many types of gun but I have managed to place them in four general categories.

· Pistols: E.g. a handgun · Automatic: E.g. a machine gun · Shot guns: E.g. 12' bore shotgun · Rifles: E.g. 22-air rifle All of these weapons are effectively deadly and are quite capable of killing a fully-grown man. This is why owning a handgun has now been made illegal in the UK.

The only two positive reasons for owning a gun are for protection and for hunting. If you are going to use them for hunting then you should only be using either a rifle or a shotgun.

Legal hunting I feel is acceptable and there is no cause for concern there, although these guns are just as capable as a handgun at killing a person so why not ban those too if they are not being purchased for clear hunting purposes? The second logical reason for owning a gun is for protection, this is the main reason for owning a gun in the U.S.A. I think that if you own a gun for protection it's a very effective way of ensuring your safety but I think there are more humane ways of doing this than ultimately shooting someone, whether it is to kill or injure someone the damage done is therefore more often than not irreparable.

Although owning a gun can give you a sense of security and well being its strange how knowing that four in every five households in the United States owns a gun of some form or another and this is accepted as normal. These can be for a genuine reason or they can be owned because they make the owner feel powerful or in one extreme they can be bought for the sole purpose of murder. Buying a gun to kill someone is an easy way out and this is made even easier by the fact that buying a gun in America is no harder than buying a can of coke. With a gun it is all too easy to make rash decision and do something you may later regret. Also you may see a gun as an easy way to get even with someone, which I'm sure to some people it is, but if you make that decision or you decide without thinking that you want to kill someone it can have tragic consequences.

In Britain a handgun ban has been passed, at the time this probably seemed like the safe way out but this has had one major repercussion, there are now thought to be over 4 times as many hand guns held illegally in the UK as there was before the ban was introduced. This has meant that there has been a dramatic increase in black market trading consequently this has made me feel that the enforcement of the ban was not well enough thought through.

I think that any form of brutality is wrong and there for, in summery I feel that there is no easy solution to this problem but I think that guns should be used only when absolutely lawfully necessary or not at all.

Matthew Annable