Gun Control or Gun Protection?

          I just read the article, "The Gun Debate", from the January 28, 2013 issue of Uprfront Magazine. In this article, the author, Patricia Smith, gives a history of gun laws and gives a brief description of each side of the argument. I think that the author, like me, is pro-gun control.
         Like Smith says, "The debate over guns in America goes back to 1791, when the Bill of Rights, the 10 amendments, was adopted." Gun control/gun rights has been an ongoing issue for a very long time. This can also be said to be one of the main reasons it's so difficult to make changes involving it because people refer to it as a right they've had since when the Bill of Rights was adopted, suggesting because it's so old, it's a given right. Right, because a document created over two centuries ago, written for when the Revolutionary War was taking place is totally appropriate as a dictator of our gun laws today. "Long one of the Constitution's most disputed passages, the Second Amendment reads, in its entirety: "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." In 2008, more than 200 years after the framers wrote the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court finally ruled on what it means: The Court says it applies to individuals, not just militias." This means that, even if you disagree with their translation of the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court has recently decided that it applies to individuals, to just militias. This has been the basis of many pro-gun arguments, stating that people have the right to own a gun in self-defense.
          Another part of gun history is that gun control laws have often been passed after tragic events involving guns such as an assassination or a shooting. "After the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which prevented mail-order sales of rifles and shotguns and banned felons and drug users from owning guns. The 1994 Brady law, which spurred in part by the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, created a national system of background checks for gun purchases," and so on. A huge reason gun control is such a big topic of conversation right now is due to the tragedy that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. People are reasonably demanding new gun restrictions to prevent guns such as the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which was what 20-year-old Adam Lanza used in December by to kill 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, Connecticut. "The AR-15 rifle that was used in the Newtown shooting was the civilian version of the military's M-16 and M-4 rifles. It's been used repeatedly in mass shootings: the killing of 12 people in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, and the killing of two people in a Portland, Oregon shopping mall in early December."
          I think it's ridiculous that it hasn't already been banned, seeing as it's appeared in so many gun-related tragedies. Even after Newtown, there have been more school shootings. Just today, there was a shooting at Lone Star College in Texas. So far it seems as if it wasn't a planned mass infliction, but it did occur after two students had some sort of altercation near the campus library (See article here). The fact is, shootings like those are becoming quite common, and actions need to be taken against these guns, especially the semi-automatic guns that can hold from thirty to hundreds of bullets.
          Gun-rights groups (the most powerful would be the National Rifles Association, a.k.a. the NRA) argue that gun control laws restrict the right to bear arms and cripple their ability to protect themselves from criminals. "The vast majority of gun owners, the N.R.A. says, use firearms responsibly". Well, of course that's true. There are not hundreds of thousands of people like Adam Lanza who intend to use guns for such awful purposes as mass shootings, etc., but just because most people use it responsibly does not mean that the few disturbed people out there will hesitate to go out and purchase a semi-automatic rifle and shoot dozens of people.  All it takes is one psycho out of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to do something awful. "Guns are why we're free in this country, and people lose sight of that when tragedies like this happen," said Scott Ostrosky. "A gun didn't kill all those children. A disturbed man killed those children." Ostrosky owns a gun range in Newtown. Yes, it was Adam Lanza who administered the gun and shot those 26 people, but do you think if he hadn't had a semi-automatic rifle and carried hundreds of rounds of ammunition, enough to kill the entire school, that those children and adults would still be dead, today? Because I sure don't. It was his idea and his action to fire that gun, but our loose gun laws made it possible.
          As Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence said, "this tragedy exposes our gun laws for what they really are: wildly inadequate and utterly insane."