Issue of Gun Control in American Politics

This event underlined a seeming paradox in American politics. Public opinion surveys have repeatedly shown that a large and growing majority of Americans, on the order of two-thirds of the public, support stronger gun-control measures (Singh, 2003, pp. 75-78). Yet, even in the face of high rates of gun-related deaths, periodically underlined by highly publicized killings, gun-control measures routinely fall short at both the federal and state level (Singh, 2003).

As the lapse of the assault weapons ban shows, this is the case even when the measure had the nominal support of a conservative president locked in a close re-election race, and at a time when the possibility of terrorism was very much in the public mind. President Bush, overwhelmingly popular within his own party, would seem to have been in a strong position to pressure congressional leaders of his own party to bring the measure

. . .
ly lower levels of gun ownership, and far stricter regulation -- often approaching outright bans -- on private gun ownership. Even the handful of exceptions are only very partial ones. Switzerland is often presented in American gun-rights advocacy literacy as a society with a quite low gun-crime rate, even though gun ownership there is nearly universal. In fact, the rate of gun ownership in Switzerland is much lower than in the United States. About 27 percent of Swiss households have a gun, an ownership rate similar to that in Canada, and about half the American gun-ownership rate (Goldring, 1999). No information is provided on the average number of guns per gun-owning household in Switzerland or Canada, but it appears to be unlikely that either country has many households with multiple guns, as is often found in the United States. A common argument by American gun-rights supporters is that guns are needed for personal protection against crime. While the natural response would be that the threat of crime in the United States is itself due to the wide availability of guns, it may be noted that while the rate of gun-related crime in the United States is high, so is the rate of non-gun crime (Singh, 2003, pp. 72-73). The
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3101
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)