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I think that if everyone owned a gun the crime rate would decrease.  Everyone would have this form of protection.  Criminals would think twice before bothering someone they knew had a gun.

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I learned that cinco de mayo is a sensitive topic these days because no one knows its true heritage. Its more than just drinking. A lot of people impersonate hispanics on cinco de mayo, they get offended of what they see. And lastly news reporters were impersonating them with sombreros, accents, and tequilla shots.

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I would get an abortion if I was raped. I personally would not want to have to face the trauma that comes with delivering a baby from such an awful event. I also think that child would end up having a worse off life because it wouldn't have a father and to know the fact that they are only born because I was raped by a man I may not even know.

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Gun control in america is strict but also more laid back than most countries UK for example, it is prohibited to possess a handgun and the crime rate has gone up, but the crime dealing with guns has gone down. In russia for every 10 people at least 6 of the ten carry a handgun and the crime in russia is lower than almost all countries. Could the influence of guns affect the overall homicide rates? And if possible what do you think would happen if every one over 20 owned a handgun in the world? Would crime rates increase or decrease? / GUN CONTROL

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Gun control in america is strict but also more laid back than most countries UK for example, it is prohibited to possess a handgun and the crime rate has gone up, but the crime dealing with guns has gone down. In russia for every 10 people at least 6 of the ten carry a handgun and the crime in russia is lower than almost all countries. Could the influence of guns affect the overall homicide rates? And if possible what do you think would happen if every one over 20 owned a handgun in the world? Would crime rates increase or decrease? / GUN CONTROL

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People now days say that abortion is horrible and killing an innocent baby is wrong and morally corrupt. Lets say you are in the situation of a sexually harrassed victim and you became pregnant. You know the option of abortion adoption or to keep it and you know the consequences of all of them, which option would you choose and why? / ABORTION

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People now days say that abortion is horrible and killing an innocent baby is wrong and morally corrupt. Lets say you are in the situation of a sexually harrassed victim and you became pregnant. You know the option of abortion adoption or to keep it and you know the consequences of all of them, which option would you choose and why? / ABORTION

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I agree that it is the people firing the guns that makes this topic a major problem. It is protected by the second amendment that we have the right to beat arms. Unless we violate that law, it should apply to everyone. People kill people not guns kill people. This problem was created because people were denying our rights because of all the shootings we've had.

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I agree with what you are saying that the government wants to take away guns but criminals will always find a way but I don't believe that they do not know this. It's a very hard soultion to compramize.

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Your picture is very true.  Citizens should be allowed to defend themselves.  A law abiding citizens has no intent to harm someone, they simply want protection

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You're spot on with your interpretation of that picture. Criminals can do whatever they want until the police arrive if they face no opposition, such as an armed citizen.

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I could see how the government could be too powerful for a revolt but i beleive there are way more of us than them and if we decided to overthrow the gov i believe its possible. They did make good points saying the only way to rebel is to vote in people against gun control, and that riots in the streets doesnt do much. I think they overlooked how many civilians their are in america as opposed to the government. We out number them in an extremely unbalanced ratio and if we all revilted then we would be unstoppable

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this quote basically states that if its illegal to have a 30 round magazine but he could still bring one on the show proves that it is still possible for anyone to have those magazines. when you tell a kid not to do something what do they do? They do it again and again.

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This picture explains how gun control works perfectly. the government wants to take away guns but they are forgetting that the criminals will always have a way to get them and then the innocent are left defenseless. It takes a policeman an average of 5-10 minutes depending on the location to show up. In 5 minutes a criminal could murder people by the tens.

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This article explains in 10 reasons why gun control could only be the worst decision for america.

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This list serves as a rebuttal of the Listverse list " 10 Arguments for Gun Control " by Morris M. This list is not intended to incite controversy, but to foster an even-sided debate. The issue of gun control is global, but since it is most controversial in the United States of America, that nation is referred to most in the following entries.

The US Constitution's Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

10 There Is Murder In The UK

Almost all handguns are banned from civilian possession, ownership, purchase, or sale in the United Kingdom as a result of the Second Firearms Act of 1997. This was in response to the Dunblane Massacre, in which 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton walked into an elementary school and shot dead 16 children, aged six or younger, and one teacher before killing himself. He used four handguns.

Now that modern handguns are no longer legal to have in the UK, let us take a look at some murder rates. The rate for intentional homicide in the UK in 1996-the year of the Dunblane Massacre-was 1.12 per 100,000. It was 1.24 in 1997, when the Firearms Act went into effect, and 1.43 in 1998. The rate rose to a peak of 2.1 in 2002 and has fallen since to 1.23 as of 2010. These numbers have, however, been called into question due to possible under-reporting of violent crimes in the UK.

It cannot be denied that the rate of homicides via guns has fallen dramatically since Dunblane, but the rate of murders has gone up. To say these higher numbers are the result of fewer people able to arm themselves for defense is drastically jumping to a conclusion, but the fact does remain that more people are killing each other in the UK today than when guns were legal to have. Even the police are almost all armed with tasers instead, so handguns are very hard to come by. All the numbers are higher in the US, of course, where there are more people, and there have been no more school shootings in the UK since Dunblane.

But in 2005, there were 765 intentional murders in the UK and most of these were committed with knives. Blunt objects follow, then strangulation, fire, and poison. Banning guns has halted rampage shootings, but it does not address the issue of people killing each other. In the US, the number of intentional homicides in 2004 was 10,654-a number that would have been much lower without access to guns, but still terribly high. Opponents of gun control are always quick to question how many victims of knives, clubs, and strangulation would be alive if they had had a gun.

9 Literary Infallibility

Thomas Jefferson once wrote "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Gun enthusiasts often couple this with a quote from Ben Franklin, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

Unfortunately, Franklin never said that. It was probably written by someone on the Internet, who then tacked his name onto it. But Jefferson's premise of not limiting the freedom of the press can extend to any freedom. Right now, American legislators are up in arms, if you'll pardon the pun, over the question of whether to limit some firearms' ammunition capacities. Proponents cite the only obvious use for an assault rifle-killing people-and defend ammunition limitations as a compromise that will save lives. Opponents maintain that a single life lost due to some maniac with a gun is just as excessive as 30.

The issue of fully automatic firearms has been a hotbed for a long time. In some states, they are legal for civilians, provided that an extra fee is paid. In North Carolina, a fully automatic M2HB .50 Browning heavy machine gun is perfectly legal to use as a home defense weapon or for hunting. This is because that state considers any limitation of guns to be unconstitutional. California does not agree. In that state, no semiautomatic firearm may contain more than 10 rounds at any time. Assault rifles are completely banned. There are some federal limits: no caliber is permissible larger than .50 unless a special and expensive license is obtained and cannons are legal to own but not to fire with real ammunition.

The debates will go on for a very long time, and most of them center on the Constitution's wording of the Second Amendment. How should we define "a well-regulated militia"? Proponents of gun control claim this should entail proper training. Opponents claim that almost all gun owners train themselves in their free time. They further claim that, should any affront be made to the Second Amendment, those who want to control guns will no longer have any line to cross. They will interpret as they see fit any word or phrase of any Amendment in order to limit more and more rights until, in this case, all guns are banned from civilian use.

8 The Civilian Need For Assault Rifles

An assault rifle is any weapon which fires high-powered rifle rounds rather than pistol rounds, semi or fully automatically. The weapon reloads each round on its own-all you have to do is pull the trigger again and again. It is true that these weapons were invented for the purpose of warfare, not hunting, though they can be used for either. Proponents of even limited gun control maintain that, if nothing else is done, assault rifles should have magazines of no more than 10 rounds at a time. The argument typically brought out in defense of this position claims that in any self-defense scenario, assault rifles are overkill.

Gun control opponents, however, have long argued that the Second Amendment was put in place not just for ordinary home defense against burglars but specifically to guarantee that the nation could never be overcome by any military power foreign or domestic. If the five branches of the US military were beaten by, say, a nuclear holocaust, the only national defense left would be the civilians themselves. Any subsequent military invasion-probably armed with AK-47 variants-would find it very easy to overrun civilians armed only with lever, bolt, and pump action weapons.

7 Welcome To Texas

The first modern school shooting occurred on August 1, 1966 and deservedly made national headlines because no one had ever heard of such diabolical insanity. If you have a problem with your boss, you might get mad and shoot him, but sniping innocent random strangers from up to 400 yards for 90 minutes somehow makes even less sense. Whitman's tower rampage on the University of Austin was not the first school shooting in the sense of a single maniac killing indiscriminately, but it was possibly the first to push the notion into the public eye. It was a direct cause of the institution of SWAT teams among city police forces around the nation. There were none before this incident, and the Austin police found themselves woefully outgunned at the outset.

They were considerably aided, in Ramiro Martinez's opinion, by several dozen students and passersby who did not take cover, but instead ran to their vehicles and brought back hunting rifles. They then took cover alongside police officers and opened fire on the observation deck, forcing Whitman to take cover and fire less often and less accurately. Martinez was one of the three officers who entered the tower and killed Whitman, and he thanked the civilians for their assistance. Whitman would certainly have killed many more than 12 from the 28th story observation deck had he not been harried by the civilians' return fire.

6 It Didn't Work For Germany

On March 10, 2009, 28-year-old Michael McClendon shot 10 people dead in a spree that covered three counties of Alabama. Gun control was immediately revived in national debates, primarily because he used two assault rifles for most of the rampage. He also had a shotgun and a pistol. McClendon had left a suicide note in which he made it clear that he despondent and enraged over his dead-end life. He began the spree by shooting his own mother, all three of her dogs, and burning down her house. He then drove down the highway shooting random people from his vehicle.

The gun control debate did not reach fever pitch, however, until a German high school student initiated a very similar rampage the next day in Winnenden, Baden-Wurttemberg, in southwestern Germany. Seventeen-year-old Timothy Kretschmer began at Albertville-Realschule, where he murdered 12 people, most of them women, then carjacked Igor Wolf and forced him to drive Kretschmer to the town of Wendlingen. While in the backseat, Kretschmer reloaded his magazines and answered Wolf's question of why he had done it. "For fun. Because it's fun." He ordered Wolf off the road near a car dealership and ran inside, murdered two more people, and then shot it out with the police, wounding two and being wounded in both legs. He opened fire on every random person he could see, then shot himself.

He killed 15 and wounded nine, all with a single 9mm pistol. This was his father's gun, since he was too young to own one, and it was the only gun his father had not locked in a safe. He had illegally kept it out and loaded in case of burglary. This is not illegal in the US. Here, we see that a child, who should not have been able to acquire a gun, did so in a nation with extremely strict laws on gun control.

5 Gun Control Equals Absolute Despotism

Of all arguments against controlling guns, this one crystallizes everything the ravenous pro-gun crowd has had to say over the years. Most Americans do not trust their government, or more properly, the people who hold the highest positions in it. This was the feeling long before Edward Snowden leaked proof of the government spying illegally on its own citizens and nations around the world. Snowden deemed this too similar to "Big Brother," as Orwell calls it, but the US government not only disagreed with him, it even defended what it was doing as not in any way criminal, though its own law books clearly differ. Snowden is not without supporters. Twitter has erected security firewalls to guard against NSA spying, and Google, Facebook, and Tumblr have followed suit.

Pro-gun citizens consider their guns the same protection. They arm themselves for the possibility of government agents taking away their rights one by one until they live in a police state in which the government is able to do anything it wants because the civilian populace is unarmed and cannot resist. In these terms, any gun control is viewed as a threat to liberty, and though the Constitution guarantees rights, it does not enforce anything. Guns do.

The Snowden fiasco in particular brought the rampant and frighteningly amoral dishonesty of the federal government back once again to the front of global debate, since America had been spying on China, France, Germany, and even Great Britain against their wishes. The pro-gun American citizens have seized on this embarrassment as yet more proof that the government is out to take away its citizens' rights, as many as possible until democracy is gone and tyranny is in place. Tthe only truly effective protection of American citizens' rights to freedom of speech, press, religion, and others are their guns.

4 Rampage Shooters Like Soft Targets

If rampage killers are so depressed that they intend to kill themselves afterward, then why hasn't anyone whipped out an assault rifle and attempted to kill people inside the US Bullion Depository near Fort Knox? Because breaking into the White House would be a lot easier. Do these shooters fear the firepower lurking around the gold? Not if they want to die, but what they do fear is not killing a lot of people beforehand. They have a rage in them, and it appears to be always the same. Motive or not, they want to exact revenge. The more dead, the merrier. The media, of course, is largely to blame for turning any shooting incident into a circus. Presently, a lovers' spat that boils over in public will make brief national headlines as a possible rampage scene.

The James Holmeses, the Cho Seung-huis, and Adam Lanzas are the sort who want to one-up the last massacre, and this can't be done in a bank. The police are on the lookout for the banks and there aren't enough people anyway. It can't be done at the White House or a police station, but malls, schools, ordinary workplaces, and churches are all soft and rich targets because they contain many people and few of them are armed.

Suppose there were a guarantee that everyone in a church on Sunday morning were armed to the teeth-pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles, and more importantly, that they were all trained to fight back. Even the most desperately depressed rage-a-holic would pick a different target. The Amarillo school district in the good ol' state of Texas has gone to the extreme of arming its entire faculty and staff as a warning to would-be maniacs. This means the teachers, janitors, groundskeepers, and secretaries all have guns on their person.

3 The Eighteenth Amendment

This amendment prohibited the production, transport, and sale of alcohol within the United States of America. It was a result of the Temperance Movement. Most of the politicians in Washington, DC strongly supported the imposition of the ban, but when it went into effect on January 17, 1920, the public responded in a way that neither the temperance movement nor the politicians had expected-few people heeded the criminalization, and those who had been manufacturing alcohol continued doing so regardless of the law. Everyone seemed haughtily recalcitrant and alcohol use flourished even more than before. The police around the country were woefully ineffective in curbing its production, sale, or consumption.

Career criminals like Al Capone became extremely rich by gaining control over the importation to entire cities. Those too afraid of the police resorted to making their own booze at home, and this resulted in many deaths from poisoning.

Replace every reference to alcohol above with a reference to guns and you have the most assured aftermath of a similar prohibition on guns-except in this scenario, the crimes involved are much deadlier. The Al Capones who rise up will attempt to gain control over a city's illegal importation of guns, and there will be street violence worse than that of the most dangerous areas of Chicago today.

The public outcry leading up to the national ban might not cause a nationwide uprising. Such a disaster can only be conjectured as alternate history fiction, but if the government enforced the ban by raiding homes and businesses, there would certainly be small-scale uprisings that easily spread. Martial law would have to be imposed in some large cities, especially in Texas. Texas might actually make good on its common threat to secede, since it does retain a provision in its state constitution which permits this. There would be civil war, but with much deadlier weapons. The war would probably not be fought in as open a form as the previous Civil War, but those who refuse to relinquish their firearms would engage in guerrilla warfare and splinter cell terrorism. None of this is to say that the US military, if loyal to the ban, could not put down such rebellion to it, but the consequences would be horrific and long-lasting.

2 Laws Do Not Apply To Criminals

We've all heard this one many times, but a point of contention that just won't go away must be quite convincing to some. Gun laws are all founded on the principle of making a nation safer by limiting its civilian population's access to guns, but laws against murder and violence do not apply to those who have given up on life and intend to die while killing as many people as they can. Laws against theft do not apply to a person who intends to steal something. The sole thing the criminally-minded care about is not getting caught. Some are reformed in prison, but in large part, those who want to break a law are not going to feel remorse when they are caught. Give them a chance and they will do it again.

From this perspective, it is difficult to fathom the logic of enacting newer, stricter gun laws on an already lawful society. Most of us obey such laws. Sale of guns is forbidden within the city limits of Chicago, an ordinance that went into effect in 2010. For the year 2013, the city's murder count is 374. There were 432 in 2010 and 500 in 2012. The FBI has named Chicago the nation's murder capital. Thus, the city ordinance did nothing to reduce its murder rate.

None of this is to imply that in areas of well-armed civilians, the violent crime rate must go down. That is not true. The highest crime rates in 2012 were in the South, where gun ownership is at its highest. But this fact as well corroborates that any imposition of gun control does not address the issue of gun-related crime.

1 Maybe In A Perfect World . . .

Let us disentangle ourselves from the trees and take a look at the forest. Because there is no national gun registry, the exact number of guns in civilian hands in the US cannot be determined, but a conservative estimate places it-as of 2010, when the gun-buying craze was just reaching its peak-at 270 million weapons. This was about 89 guns per 100 people, the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. Yemen was second with 55 per 100, and Switzerland third. As of 2013, Serbia is second.

Another estimate, conducted by Congressional Research in 2012, places the total number of weapons in US civilian hands at 310 million as of 2009. By today, that means almost 1 gun for every single citizen, including infants. What would gun control even mean at this point? Assume this federal law: from 2014 on, no more assault rifles. Those who already own one may keep theirs, but such weapons will disappear from gun stores and pawn shops. Have we controlled much of anything? There are still at least 3 million assault rifles out there.

In a perfect world, gun control would mean going house to house throughout the nation and taking away every single firearm, including muzzle loaders. That would be impossible. Regardless of its constitutionality, gun owners would either fight back until there were a nationwide civil war or simply hide their weapons and claim they have none. Since most of those in the US are unregistered, no one knows who has what. Owners could always claim they destroyed those that are registered.

Thus, to debate gun control is a futile exercise. They cannot be controlled-not anymore. The continuation of buying and selling them cannot make the situation any worse because criminals will never again have to go far to find one.

FlameHorse is a writer for Listverse.

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10 Arguments Against Gun Control - Listverse

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This list serves as a rebuttal of the Listverse list " 10 Arguments for Gun Control " by Morris M. This list is not intended to incite controversy, but to foster an even-sided debate. The issue of gun control is global, but since it is most controversial in the United States of America, that nation is referred to most in the following entries.

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This article explains why gun control can possibly crumble america and why gun control only helps criminals and mass murderers out by taking the innocent peoples protection

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I agree what you said here about being able to take care of violence with guns without having to ban them, untimately feeling the "freedom" this country promises.

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I read the article that Ben Smoots read as well and I agree that people are for gun control are getting smarter about their approach over the issue. However, This does not outweigh the benefits of being able to own a personal firearm. I'll give you an example. Say a young lady walks down MLK Street at night by herself. A group of men see this lady and actually start following her. The men start harassing her and try to grab her inappropriately. The girl has two choices at this point, run and get help that may not get their on time, or she can pull out a Colt M1911 and fire off a warning shot. Personal protection is a huge benefit or owning a fire arm. The con of owning one is the responsibility, it is like any other item on planet Earth. People control the aim and the hammer, and the trigger, and even the amount of ammunition that is determined appropriate for the situation. The only gun control that is needed is the individual who wields a gun.

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I read "How the Gun-Control Movement got Smart" article in your positive 2 post. The two opposing political parties have essentially been gridlocked since the 90's when liberals first started pushing for a ban on handguns. These gun control groups don't use the term "gun-control," instead they favor "preventing gun violence." This is a load of crap because there are a plethora of options the government could utilize to help prevent violence with guns without banning them.

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While many people have decidedly formed opinions on gun control, the debate is complicated and has strong supporters on both sides. The pros and cons of gun control come to the forefront of debate in the wake of mass shootings that continue to pop up throughout the nation. Yet support for federal bans and reforms remain elusive. Even the devastating attack at Sandy Hook Elementary in December of 2012 failed to garner a consensus on the issue of background checks for gun purchases.

The debate is complicated and lacks easy answers, but here are some major pros and cons for gun control.

Those who are for greater gun control see three basic pros to new laws:

1. Gun massacres most often use legal weapons: According to Mother Jones, of the more than 70 mass shootings in the United States in the last 30 years, about three-quarters of the guns used were obtained legally by the killers. Pro-gun control advocates believe tougher gun laws could have potentially prevented these crimes.

2. Gun control laws protect children and families: Moms Demand Action, a grassroots group founded in response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, believes guns in America are creating a public health crisis that is attacking children, citing statistics that show nearly eight American children are shot and killed every day. The group says stronger laws are the answer to protecting children.

3. Background checks will help keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them: Americans for Responsible Solutions, supported by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her astronaut husband Mark Kelly, advocates for background checks to prevent criminals, domestic abusers, and seriously mentally ill people from buying guns. The group says laws requiring background checks have prevented the purchase of guns by nearly 2 million people who should not have had them.

Those who believe new laws for gun control are not the answer argue the following cons:

1. "Self-defense is a fundamental right," says the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action. The group points out that the right to bear arms for self-defense is protected in all states as well as the U.S. Constitution. Handgun restriction laws have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

2. Violent crime goes down when more people legally carry guns: Right-to-carry laws have been on the rise in the U.S. since the early 1990s. At the same time, violent crime rates have decreased. The number of privately owned guns has risen by about 100 million. According to the NRA, "Through 2010, the nation's murder rate has decreased 52 percent to a 47-year low, and the total violent crime rate has decreased 48 percent to a 37-year low."

3. Widely supported gun bans don't deter crime: The Federal Assault Weapons ban, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, expired and has not had enough support to be renewed. The NRA argues that research shows "assault weapons," or those certain semi-automatic guns designated in the ban, "have never been used in more than a small percentage of firearm-related violent crime."

URGENT: Do You Support President Obama's Plans for Stricter Gun Control? Vote Now

© 2017 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Gun Control Pros and Cons: 3 Points on Both Sides of Debate

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While many people have decidedly formed opinions on gun control, the debate is complicated and has strong supporters on both sides. The pros and cons of gun control come to the forefront of debate in the wake of mass shootings that continue to pop up throughout the nation.

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The bias found in this source seems to show more for gun control because they word their article in such a way that it seems to them the government is doing the right thing by recommending background checks and other specific restrictions making gun control smarter

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A frequent question in the current battle over gun control is why anyone should expect reform to succeed now when it's failed repeatedly for the last 20 years. Maybe this is why: Between then and now, advocates of gun control got smarter. They've radically changed their message into one that's more appealing to Middle America and moderate voters.

In the late '90s, "Democrats and gun-control groups had approached the debate consistently in a way that deeply, almost automatically alienated a lot of gun owners," said Jon Cowan, former president of a now-defunct group called Americans for Gun Safety.

The story of the way the gun debate changed is largely the story of AGS. Formed in 2000 by Andrew McKelvey, the CEO of Monster.com, the group sought to reset the terms of the debate and steer the gun-control movement away from its inward-looking, perpetually squabbling, far-left orientation. The various advocacy groups were often more concerned with fighting with each other than with taking the fight to their opponents, and a vocal contingent valued ideological purity over pragmatism.

For example, an April 1999 newspaper report on President Clinton's plans for gun reform after the mass shooting at Columbine High School includes this paragraph:

In the end, no federal legislation passed in the wake of Columbine. Infighting and unrealistic goals also helped doom the Assault Weapons Ban in 2004, when it was up for renewal.

"There was as much fighting between the groups as with the opposition," David Hantman, a former aide to the bill's sponsor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, recalled. "Some of them insisted that we couldn't just renew [the ban], we had to strengthen it." With Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, that wasn't politically feasible, and the ban was allowed to lapse. Around the same time, legislation to close the "gun-show loophole" by requiring background checks for non-dealer gun sales was defeated, and Congress passed a bill according gun manufacturers blanket immunity from product-liability lawsuits.

McKelvey, a Yellow Pages ad marketer-turned-tech billionaire, came to the gun issue after being shocked by Columbine. Described by friends as an apolitical businessman who enjoyed hunting (he died of cancer in 2008), McKelvey was frustrated by the tone-deaf approach he saw the gun-control movement taking. He joined the board of Handgun Control Inc. and immediately began pressuring the group to change its name, promising substantial financial support in exchange for such a move; when the group resisted, he quit the board and set out to form his own group -- AGS.

If the NRA today seems fixated on the notion that the left is out to undercut the Second Amendment, confiscate law-abiding Americans' legally acquired firearms, and instigate federal-government monitoring of all gun owners, that's because 15 years ago, gun-control advocates wanted to do all of those things.

Federal licensing and registration as a requirement for gun ownership was a top policy goal -- in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary, then-Vice President Al Gore came out in favor of photo licenses for gun owners, drawing criticism from Senator Bill Bradley, who supported the further step of registering every gun. National bans on handguns were also on the agenda: One such proposal, introduced in the House and Senate in 1993, would have "prohibit[ed] the transfer or possession of handguns and handgun ammunition, except in limited circumstances," requiring current handgun owners to turn in their weapons over the course of a six-month grace period. And the idea that the Second Amendment didn't confer an individual right to own a gun, which was at the time a fairly mainstream legal view, was part of the gun-control movement's gospel. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that such a right existed, knocking down the D.C. handgun ban in the process.)

"The right to own a gun is flat-out stated in the Second Amendment," Cowan told me. By taking a position -- however legally defensible -- that that right didn't apply to individuals, gun-control advocates were putting up "a stone wall, a barrier to gun owners" that made them "logically presume you want to take their gun away," he added.

In 1999, when McKelvey was looking to change the gun debate, Cowan was a former chief of staff to then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo. The two teamed up to start AGS.

From the start, the group was not shy about confronting its peers in the movement. In an essay published in 2001 in Blueprint Magazine, the organ of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Cowan and AGS Policy Director Jim Kessler wrote that Democrats "will have a hard time recapturing the presidency and building a durable majority if it treats gun-owning Americans like sociopaths." They continued:

On the right ... the public face of the gun lobby is that of Charlton Heston daring anyone to pry that flintlock from his cold dead hands. On the left are various gun-control groups that view gun ownership as an absolute wrong. They believe the Constitution does not confer an individual right to own a gun; that owning a gun is irresponsible and unsafe; and that America is a more violent place because of access to guns. The public face of the gun-control lobby is a mother at a rally with a sticker on her cheek showing a handgun with a red slash drawn across it.

Meanwhile, they wrote, most Americans were in the middle -- they believed gun ownership should be legal, but should come with responsibilities and common-sense restrictions. "Even 65 percent of gun owners and 61 percent of Americans who view the NRA favorably agree that gun rights and reasonable gun restrictions can coexist," Cowan and Kessler wrote. But no one was speaking for that silent majority.

The plea for a new approach resonated with Democrats who were tired of losing on the gun issue. Clinton believed the backlash to the Brady Bill had helped hand the House to Newt Gingrich and the GOP in 1994; Gore blamed the gun issue for his electoral-vote loss in 2000, which could have been avoided if he'd done better in formerly Democratic states like Tennessee and West Virginia that had come to see the party as out of touch with their values.

Bill Andresen, a former chief of staff to Senator Joe Lieberman, recalled how toxic the issue was with blue-collar voters back then. "I remember when Lieberman was running for vice president," he said. "We were in Michigan, and he was doing visits to plants, shaking hands with union workers. The first thing he said to me after -- all the people he was talking to said, 'I want to vote for you, but I can't, because you're going to take my gun away.' These were union voters, UAW workers, and the Democratic Party was losing them" over gun control. Andresen credits AGS with "fundamentally changing the debate in an important way."

AGS's big political project was a pair of 2000 state-level ballot initiatives to close the gun-show loophole in Colorado and Oregon. In the wake of Columbine, the Colorado initiative polled strongly from the start, but advocates had to make sure they didn't bleed support from moderate- and conservative-minded voters, particularly middle-aged men, said Rick Ridder, a Denver-based political consultant who spearheaded AGS's efforts in the state.

Mailers featured hunters expressing their support for the Second Amendment, imagery and language that reappropriated the other side's emphasis on sportsmen and the Constitution. And the group got Senator John McCain, the well-known maverick from Arizona, to record a television commercial in support of the initiative. "I'm John McCain with some straight talk," he said in the ad. "Convicted felons have been able to buy and sell thousands of guns at gun shows because of a loophole in the law. Many were later used in crimes, and that's wrong .... I believe law-abiding citizens have the right to own guns, but with rights come responsibilities."

Both ballot initiatives passed that November, and the AGS-endorsed talking points quickly became central to the way advocates approached the gun debate. The group's effectiveness could be seen in the viciousness with which it came under attack. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, in a speech in April 2002 -- seven months after 9/11 -- compared McKelvey and AGS to Osama bin Laden and "the Al Qaeda": "Fomenting fear for political gain, funding an ongoing campaign, to hijack your freedom and take a box cutter to the Constitution. That's political terrorism, a far greater threat to your freedom than any foreign force."

AGS ceased to exist in 2005, its staff and advocacy absorbed by the center-left think tank Third Way, of which Cowan now serves as president. But its success endures. These days, proponents of gun-control don't quite march in lockstep, but the movement -- long one of the most quixotic and beleaguered factions of the progressive coalition, on a par with environmentalists and campaign-finance advocates -- is fairly disciplined around the new message. "In the past, there were a lot of pitfalls that those seeking change on this issue had fallen into," the Brady Campaign's president, Dan Gross, told me. (Handgun Control Inc. changed its name a year after McKelvey quit the board over the issue.) "The message is now turned outward instead of inward, focused on engaging and mobilizing the latent majority of the American public that supports common-sense measures like universal background checks." Now, a representative email from a Colorado progressive group to its supporters is headlined, "No one is coming to take your gun."

National Democrats' embrace of the Second Amendment has been credited with defusing a flash point in the culture wars and helping the party turn the Rocky Mountain West into a swing region. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, has a lifetime "B" rating from the NRA and in 2010 shared the stage with LaPierre at the opening of a gun range in Las Vegas for which Reid had secured federal land and a $61 million earmark. (The NRA nonetheless declined to endorse Reid in his 2010 reelection, but it also did not endorse his opponent or campaign against him.)

Reid likely owes his majority to Democrats' success in recent years at rebranding themselves as pro-gun and winning over rural, blue-collar, and Western voters. But as with the DLC's larger project of moving the party to the center, this success has come at a cost to the party's former progressive ideals. If the gun-control movement is more strategic now than it once was, it's also less ambitious. The president's package of reform proposals -- carefully touted as "gun-violence prevention," in keeping with the taboo on the potentially alienating phrase "gun control" -- would have been considered incrementalist 15 years ago. And the same red-state Democrats who can thank smarter gun messaging for their Senate seats now may pose the greatest obstacle to measures like a new ban on assault weapons.

"Fomenting fear to hijack your freedom and take a box cutter to the Constitution. That's political terrorism, a far greater threat to your freedom than any foreign force." --Wayne LaPierre, 2002

The whole debate, in short, has shifted to the right. "Democrats are now more conservative on guns, and Republicans are much more conservative as well," Hantman, the former Feinstein aide, said. The NRA itself has become more hard-line: Post-Columbine, the group took a more accommodating stance, coming out in favor of expanding background checks and barely fighting the 2000 state ballot initiatives. An ad aired by Mayors Against Illegal Guns during the Super Bowl last weekend featured a clip of LaPierre testifying in favor of background checks in 1999. At the time, "When some NRA Board members objected to the NRA supporting gun control, Wayne LaPierre (chief operating officer of the NRA) and Jim Baker (chief lobbyist) threatened to quit if the NRA backed away from instant background checks," according to a 2001 article in National Review that argued that the NRA, not AGS, was the true moderate voice in the gun debate.

Perhaps no politician typifies the shift so much as McCain, who tacked steadily to the right as he fended off primary challengers first for the 2008 presidential election and then for his 2010 Arizona reelection. In addition to taping ads in favor of gun control, in 2004 he cosponsored federal gun-control legislation with Lieberman. In the current debate, however, he's been silent on the issue. "I think all of us should have this conversation. I applaud the conversation," McCain said when asked about guns last month on CBS's Face the Nation. "We need to have it stopped, but to somehow believe that guns away from people is the answer -- I don't think history shows that that's the right way to do it."

McCain also said he was against a new assault-weapons ban, which he's opposed in the past. I followed up with his communications director, Brian Rogers, and asked if the senator had taken a position on some of the other measures being considered -- universal background checks, restricting magazines, cracking down on gun trafficking. "He hasn't," Rogers replied.

The gun debate has changed in remarkable ways in the last 15 years. But whether that change makes it more likely something gets done on the issue remains to be seen.

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A frequent question in the current battle over gun control is why anyone should expect reform to succeed now when it's failed repeatedly for the last 20 years. Maybe this is why: Between then and now, advocates of gun control got smarter. They've radically changed their message into one that's more appealing to Middle America and moderate voters.

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WHO- the entire world has conflicts with the rules and regulations of gun control

WHAT- conflicts with the rules and regulations of gun control

WHEN- modern day world

WHERE- across the globe

WHY- people believe they should have their rights to bare arms but the government says otherwise

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Gun control refers to domestic regulation of firearm manufacture, trade, possession, use, and transport, specifically with regard to the class of weapons referred to as small arms ( revolvers and self-loading pistols, rifles and carbines, assault rifles, submachine guns and light machine guns).

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I chose gun control because i have a deep passion for guns and other types of arms. i feel they play a big part in our society today as protection. If we were banned guns the bad people would still find ways to get them. That leaves the innocent people defensless against them.