Why do Americans insist on owning guns?

Why do Americans insist on holding guns? On March 24, the largest demonstration since the outbreak of the Vietnam War in the United States, the "March for Our Lives"...

On March 24, the largest demonstration since the outbreak of the Vietnam War in the United States, the "March for Our Lives" Lives). Millions of students, teachers, parents, etc. across the United States held demonstrations in more than 400 cities, calling for "whatever it takes" to finally stop gun violence and implement stricter gun control.

The "March for Our Lives" was the largest demonstration since the outbreak of the Vietnam War in the United States. 800 cities around the world responded, and 400 cities across the United States broke out simultaneously. Five American high school students who launched the "#NeverAgain" anti-gun movement also appeared on the cover of the latest issue of Time magazine. They came from the high school where a mass shooting occurred in Parkland, South Florida last month. At that time, a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 students in the school.

Five high school students who launched the "#NeverAgain" anti-gun movement appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The demands of the people marching in the United States include: 1. Ban the sale of semi-automatic rifles that can convert guns into automation. 3. Establish a database of gun sales and background checks. 5. Close the loopholes in the sale of second-hand guns. 7. Increase funding for mental illness control and research. 8. Strengthen campus security. There are about 70 to 80 million Americans holding guns, with a total of 300 million. Another figure is that about 13,000 people are shot and killed in the United States every year (this statistic does not include suicide). It may be difficult for many Chinese people to understand that at a time when school shootings are frequent in the United States, not only is it impossible to completely ban guns in the United States, but there is also strong resistance to stricter gun control. I believe that the following article will inspire you. Zheng Kaicheng is a Chinese American, born and raised in the United States. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a major in history and Chinese. He was a scholar at Tsinghua University in 2017 and is a self-media expert. "It happened again." . . " I said to myself when I saw news reports about the Florida school shooting. Friends in the United States will say that this incident is a pity and tragedy, but the two camps that support and oppose the privilege of holding guns have very different reactions and specific feelings about the frequent shootings.

Victims of the Florida shooting The National Rifle Association of the United States, which has 14 million members: Owning a gun is a way of life I once asked an American retired soldier friend (who participated in the war in Afghanistan and also worked as an independent contractor in Kuwait) to take me to practice shooting. I personally like military history and often read various materials about military weapons and equipment, but I dare not buy a gun for my home. When I came to the National Rifle Association (NRA) shooting range, my friend taught me how to use two different types of guns-pistols and shotguns.

When I was standing on the shooting line, I remembered that someone was using his own gun next to me. Gun shooting, there were some couples next to me, using the shooting range as a date place. What impressed me very much was that there were all kinds of customers here: old people, young people, boys, girls, whites, Asians, blacks, Latinos, from a certain point of view. This also represents the multiculturalism of the United States. My friend told me to take a deep breath first. I practiced shooting with a pistol and shot some paper targets. After the teaching, we switched to a powerful shotgun. Every time I fired with this gun, the recoil of the shotgun would hit the inside of my shoulder. Although I am not a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), many Americans who go to shooting ranges are members of this association. According to the American independent think tank Pew Research Center (Pew Research Center) in 2017. A 2018 survey found that 14 million Americans said they belonged to the National Rifle Association, but only 5 million actually paid membership fees.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is the most influential gun owners' organization in the United States. Originally founded to promote marksmanship, it has grown into the most influential gun-ownership group. For the United States, which has a population of more than 300 million, 230 million of whom have reached voting age, and 14 million people (especially considering the low voter turnout rate in the United States) is still a quite influential group. In addition, the National Rifle Association of the United States will lobby politicians who support them and fund these politicians and candidates to win more votes for them. The article "Why is Gun Control So Difficult in the United States" published by China Business News asked: Historically, after experiencing mass shootings and gun control debates again and again, even if polls show that most Americans support strict gun control, the White House and Congress always end up "moving closer" to the position of the NRA (National Rifle Association). Why does the NRA always win in the end? In a nutshell, the NRA's powerful influence is mainly reflected in two aspects: gun fans and money.

A gun buyer handles his rifle. Statistics show that during the 2016 US election season, the National Rifle Association invested US$54.4 million in political campaign funds. US$30 million of this money was invested in Trump's campaign, and most of the rest was evenly divided among the six Republican candidates running for Congress, five of whom eventually won. At the same time, the National Rifle Association has spent years of lobbying to create an American social movement that is difficult to overturn: gun ownership is a way of life, an integral part of a person's freedom and security, and needs to be protected every day. In addition, the National Rifle Association of the United States has terrifying grassroots mobilization power. Most of their 5 million registered members will respond to the association's call, including helping candidates call voters to canvass for votes during the political election season, and knocking on doors at voters' homes to canvass votes. They will do so. Why do a quarter of Americans think they must own guns? I have always been curious, why do about a quarter of Americans think they must carry guns? They are all members and potential supporters of the National Rifle Association. In the United States, most people who support Republicans generally support gun rights. The diversity of the supporter group is also reflected in: the top ten members of the National Rifle Association in the United States, including IT practitioners, publishers, and geologists. Moreover, they are also staunch supporters of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Article 2 of the Bill of Rights, passed in 1791, clearly states: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The red ones in the picture are not allowed to allow citizens to carry concealed/concealed guns in public at all, the yellow ones may be allowed but require selective approval by law enforcement agencies, the blue ones are that once you pass the test, you can get a license, the green ones are completely unrestricted and you can openly/concealed carry guns without any documents. Jefferson, the founding father of the United States, believed that whether the American people dared to freely hold guns was the litmus test of whether the U.S. government truly believed in the people. I think this passage also represents the thoughts of many Americans. Although this freedom comes with certain costs and sacrifices, it is indeed a so-called "touchstone" for the government to trust the people. From a historical perspective, we can trace its roots back to the American Revolution. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was originally intended to give American civilians and militia the right to resist the British Empire and Indians. Another consideration is that the guns the American Founding Fathers knew were muskets that were difficult to aim and prone to malfunction. And these guns, even if a soldier knew how to reload, could only fire two or three bullets a minute at most. Continuing to talk about some historical and cultural factors, guns have a very unique position in the thinking of the American people. For American southerners before 1860 (before the Civil War), gun ownership was not only a way to resist government checks and balances, but also a tool to control black slaves. Americans have been exploring the western part of the American continent, making what they call "Journey to the West." During this period, guns have also become a survival tool, whether it is to deal with conflicts with Indians or for hunting. Today, however, a typical AR-15 machine gun can fire 13 rounds per second. I believe that the founding fathers of the United States could not have imagined that these weapons would develop to such an advanced level. If Washington and Jefferson could have imagined that pistols would be so lethal in the hands of some American high school students, perhaps the founding fathers would have thought twice about the right to bear arms when discussing the Constitution.

Musket from the American Revolutionary War

The Modern AR-15 Machine Gun To this day, American society at all levels has very different ideas about gun privileges. Celebrity groups, including those in the United States, are also deeply divided on this issue. For example, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Johnny Depp all support the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. On the contrary, there are also many celebrities who are opposed to the Second Amendment, including Matt Damon and former actor and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are opposed to the privilege of carrying guns. It's also another portrayal of how divided American society is on this issue.

To put it simply, the two major political parties in the United States, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, basically have completely different views on gun ownership. The Democratic Party wants to control citizens' rights to bear arms as much as possible (but no candidate has said that they will completely abolish this privilege); the Republican point of view is to try to maintain the right to bear arms in a very liberal state. The 2016 election also highlighted the differences in views between the two parties. Hillary Clinton said early on that she promised to adopt stricter background checks for gun buyers, while Trump emphasized early on that he would expand the rights and freedoms to own guns. Your chance of being shot to death in the United States is 4 in 100,000. One question is, is the United States safe with so many guns?

This issue is difficult to generalize. Some Americans and some people who have lived in the United States for a long time (including my own parents) have never been in any dangerous situation, but I also know a person who said that his wife was threatened at gunpoint by a robber in California and was robbed at gunpoint three times. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a very safe area of ​​the United States in Northern Virginia (McLean, Virginia). According to statistics from my local police department, the neighborhood where I live has a low violent crime rate, in other words, the chance of an act of violence occurring is 1 in 2197. The opposite situation occurs in Chicago, a city with a high crime rate in the United States. According to Chicago Police Department statistics in 2017, there were 2,785 shootings in the city and 3,457 people were killed by gunfire (but there is no guarantee that they were all shot by someone else). I believe anyone who sees this statistic will feel horrified.

In the past five years, after every mass shooting, Democratic congressmen have always tried to introduce gun control bills, but never succeeded. The picture shows Americans who oppose assault guns. Speaking of national averages, approximately 13,000 people are killed by gunfire in the United States each year (this statistic does not include suicide). To roughly calculate your likelihood of being fatally shot by a gun in the United States, simple math is this: The population of the United States is 325 million, assuming 13,000 gun deaths per year. So 325,000,000 divided by 13,000 equals 0.00004. Simply put, without taking into account specific regions and actual circumstances, your chance of being shot to death in the United States is 4 in 100,000. But that doesn’t mean guns and shootings aren’t a problem in the United States. Compared with other countries, the gun death rate in the United States is indeed very high. The New York Times estimates that for every million people in the United States, 31.2 people are killed by gunfire. Basically, all other developed countries are much safer than the United States in this regard. In France, there are two gun deaths per million people. If compared with China, where there are 1.6 gun deaths per million people, the gun death rates in Iceland and Japan are even lower. This indicator data is 0.6 in Iceland and only 0.1 in Japan.

The left side of the chart above represents the country, and the data on the right illustrates the death rate from gunshot deaths per million people. The number in the middle shows the likelihood of death from a gun compared with the likelihood of death from other causes. For example, in the United States, the likelihood of death from a gunshot is the same as death from a car accident; in China, the likelihood of death from a gunshot is the same as death from a plane crash; in Japan, the likelihood of death from a gunshot is the same as death from being struck by lightning. (Referenced from the New York Times report) I want to mention these statistics because many people from different countries often ask me how the security situation in the United States is. There is no general answer to this question. Objective data shows that the likelihood of you being shot casually in the United States is still quite low, especially because you are unlikely to go to the most dangerous areas of Chicago or Los Angeles. Implementation of mandatory gun buyback program in the United States may lead to a civil war When it comes to solving the unique problem of guns in the United States, so far there really is no one, institution, or political party that can come up with a solution suitable for the United States. Some people will refer to the 1996 Port Arthur shooting tragedy in Australia. A gunman shot and killed 35 innocent people. Subsequently, the Australian government responded by adopting very strict laws to control gun ownership, and the Australian government also adopted a mandatory buyback program. In the end, Australia basically solved their own shooting problem.

Selected Gun Buyers But this plan is difficult to apply in the United States. First of all, the population of the United States is more than ten times larger than that of Australia, and the number of individual gun owners in the United States is also particularly high (according to statistics, more than 300 million guns are owned by individuals in the United States); secondly, the status of gun-carrying culture in American culture is much higher than that in Australia. Many experts predict that if a similar mandatory buyback program were implemented in the United States, it would literally lead to a civil war. The last time the American people had conflicting opinions about a particular constitutional privilege it resulted in the Civil War. The most important question is that American culture and people have a special affection for gun ownership. So how does the United States control the risk of gun abuse? Some suggest teaching teachers how to handle guns, adding more armed security guards in schools, and installing more metal detectors, while others think we must eliminate the right to bear arms altogether.

There are also some more optimistic things to bring up. Local governments in some states in the United States have begun to enact their own laws, raising the legal age limit for buying guns to 21 years old, not allowing people with a history of domestic violence to buy guns, and conducting more careful background checks on people who want to buy guns. At the same time, the government has promised to strictly ban assault weapons. When I was playing with a gun, my most profound feeling was: I couldn't believe that I had such power in my hand that could shatter a paper target, or even any gun target. It's kind of like you're wielding lightning in your hand and then you're shooting that power at your target which is a thrilling and scarier feeling at the same time. Here's the magic question in America: Is owning a gun the ultimate expression of freedom, or is it an unwanted right and privilege? -End-