Modifying Firearms Regulations

Modifying Firearms Regulations,

One of the favorite pastimes of millions of Americans is to head down to the rifle range and fire a few rounds into a target, and many of us like to find a place up in the mountains to shoot. Along with people liking to shoot, many of us also hunt for subsistence or for sport. If not for the Second Amendment, the world would be a much different place. When the second amendment was being put to paper the weapon of choice was a single shot musket which was not an easily concealable weapon. Our ancestors who wrote the constitution could not see what the future would bring in the way of assault weapons and some of the people that would own them. I believe that assault style weapons should be restricted and only the military be able to obtain them. While I fully support the second amendment, I think that there has to be modifications made to it every once in awhile to keep up with technology. It is also my strong believe that every law-abiding citizen should be able to own guns, for there is some truth to the saying “if they outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.”

There have been numerous articles about gun control and the outlawing of guns. It seems to me that there should be a happy medium somewhere between the two topics. What the courts should not attempt to do is completely outlaw guns, for this is something that would just make outlaws out of decent upstanding people and the true criminals would just continue to break the law just as they already are. What should happen is that the manufacturers should be held accountable if they are the distributor of an assault type gun that is used in any murder or assault. In the future it could possibly curtail the number of murders and accidental shootings . If manufacturers had to pay a large fine for each and every time their weapons were used for such a crime I do believe that the companies building these weapons would eventually quit.

My children have been brought up in a different environment than I had; therefore, they were not allowed to start shooting until they were nine years old. For my fifth birthday I was entrusted with my very first .22 caliber rifle which was a single shot and my father was my governing body. He had his rules and no one dared break them for fear of losing privledges and the right to have our gun. If this passage sounds familiar, it is what’s supposed to happen to criminals; however, not everybody that breaks the law learns his/her lesson and continue to break the law. Guns do not kill people! Untrained people and criminals who use guns to kill people has more truth to it.

The Second Amendment gives every citizen the right to bear arms. This phrase has been a hotly debated argument for decades, mainly by the National Rifleman’s Association, of which I am a member. While most of the people opposing the change to the Second Amendment are honest upstanding citizens, there are those arguing for the right to own and use assault weapons for their own reasons. These are the people that are fighting for the legalization of assault weapons, people that are getting prepared for either a civil war are a race war. I have yet to see any reason to own an assault rifle other than a high rate of fire, which is useless for hunting or target shooting.

To keep the criminal element from thinking about using a gun in their criminal pursuits, the penalties for pulling a weapon during a crime should be extremely harsh; along with the penalty for the crime, they should also forfeit other rights, such as search and seizure. What if searches on ex-convicts could be conducted randomly? The police and probation officers are allowed to do random urinalysis's on ex-convicts. Why is it that they cannot do random search and seizure of any weapons while on probation since ex-cons are not supposed to own weapons. That would probably cut down on the murder rate although the lawyers would argue for their civil rights. I am all for civil rights. I am not for criminals getting anything they do not earn just like law-abiding citizens do; nevertheless, I do believe that their rights should be modified considerably to include random searches for five years after getting out of prison. Once they have become a productive citizen for that long they could start to earn rights back, by every year of good behavior on the outside. This would be a good trial program.

Possibly the most common type of shooting, is of the accidental variety and most of these accidents involve automatic or semi-automatic weapons. I have been a gun enthusiast for over 40 years and I have yet to shoot anyone or to have an accidental discharge with my bolt-action rifles, and revolver pistols; furthermore, I have been through three individual training programs for firearms safety for my family as much as for myself. I have always kept my weapons locked up and the ammunition locked in a different room out of sight, so that there will never be an accident in my house. For home protection I have a pistol that has a clip which I keep out of the pistol and the weapon is kept unloaded for safety purposes.

In all of the years I have been shooting and cleaning my weapons I have never thought of using one of them in a crime. With modifications to the constitution regarding machinegun style weapons and the search and seizure of weapons from ex-convicts, we would have a much safer environment for our future generations. Anyone wanting to purchase a weapon should have to go through firearms safety along with showing receipts for gunlocks. I am all for the Second Amendment, but with modifications to make the country a little safer from ourselves.