Recently a heated debate about the ban of assault weapons has been going on, which made everyone re-evaluate the need for assault weapons in the households.
All assault weapons in possession of a civilian cause great danger to the life of the community. Each person carrying a gun must be professionally trained on how to operate it; otherwise, people around are exposed to danger. In the hands of an inexperienced or uneducated person, assault weapons may result in fatal incidents, which endangers the whole community. There are many examples of misconduct with assault guns that cause trauma or even death, and mass shootings are one of the most severe and dreadful examples. Only professionals must be allowed to carry deadly weapons regardless if they are semi-automatic or fully-automatic; in both cases, a gun is still a gun that exposes the surrounding to serious jeopardy. Many civilians are scared to be around people who carry guns in public places because it makes them feel unsafe due to the fact that one can never know what accident can happen in a moment. Assault weapons become a deadly instrument in the hands of a wrong person and can harm innocent people with no prior intentions of doing it, which is one justified reason why assault weapons must be banned.
Every civilians must rely on the full protection of the police. Police forces’ main goal is to protect the community by any means and keep people safe no matter what. Every citizen should realize that by keeping a dangerous assault weapon at home they put their friends, neighbours; moreover the whole community at risk. When in meantime hundreds of officers tirelessly work and put their life on the line for the purpose of keeping the neighborhood safe by all means. People must feel protected staying in their own homes without worrying about how fast they can run to the safe and pull out an assault weapon to shoot a potential invader to protect themselves. The law enforcement system reacts within minutes to any emergency, so there is no need for a civilian to hold an easily-accessed gun at home that may threaten the safety of others. Law enforcement exists to keep all people secure day and night, regardless of who they are or where they live. Every European country has a ban against assault weapons, and the crime rates are evidentially low than why it cannot be the same in the United States. If the police have to earn the trust of the Americans, let them do so, but no civilian must have an assault weapon in their possession for personal protection. Law enforcement’s main priority is the total security of every citizen.
For a decade from 1994 to 2004, there was an operative law that banned assault weapons. According to the article in New York Times, public mass shootings — which they define as “incidents in which a gunman killed at least six people in public”— significantly decreased during the time of the federal ban (Donohue & Boulouta, 2019). After 2004, when this particular ban was canceled, the amount of mass shootings throughout the country have been significantly increasing yearly along with possession of military weapons and high-capacity magazines. Without free access to the assault weapons, people are much less likely to possess it and, in consequence, fatally misconduct it. Moreover, people not mentally or physically qualified to possess fatal weapons would not be exposed to them. This fact proves that banning assault weapons impacts the safety of the community and decreases fatal shootings among them.
Work Cited
Donohue, J., & Boulouta, T. (2019). That Assault Weapon Ban? It Really Did Work. Web.