By Kristina Gamble

Contributing Writer

In 1787, the newly formed United States of America produced the Constitution. The document guaranteed rights to citizens for centuries to come because of the abuses they had endured from Great Britain. In 1791, the delegates included the Bill of Rights as an addition to the document because they felt that the Constitution as written could lead to tyranny by a central government. The Second Amendment guarantees all United States citizens the right to bear arms. These twenty-seven words have been the topic of feverish debate as we enter 2013.

Democratic officials have been pushing to tighten the already tough gun control laws making it near impossible for people to obtain guns. The government is exhorting the events of December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in order to push stronger gun regulations on citizens. As a gun enthusiast, I look to the facts.

In 1976, Washington D.C. passed a law “generally prohibiting residents from possessing handguns and requiring that all firearms in private homes be kept unloaded and rendered temporally inoperable with the installation of a trigger lock.” With the passage of this law, murder rates increased by 73 percent while overall United States murder rates averaged 11 percent lower.

Between 1982 and 2010, Chicago instituted a similar gun control enforcement policy on handguns. Murder rates also increased, for example in 2005, 96 percent of firearm murder victims, were killed with handguns. The law was deemed an “utter failure” and “unconstitutional”. The Supreme Court repealed the handgun ban in 2010.

The obvious trend here is that gun control bans do not change the ways of criminals. Stricter gun control laws take guns out of law abiding citizen’s hands, and leave them exposed to illegal gun violence. According to the Uniform Crime Report, in 2011, 591 felons were killed by law enforcement and private citizens while in the act of committing a felony.

In 2001, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology released a survey finding that U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year. The Second Amendment provisions protect people almost a million times per year, so how can Congress say the Amendment is outdated?

All above information has been fact checked by the author.