# data[].attributes.body
WAP stands for Work At Pizza Hut

# data[].attributes.body
Hello, my name is Sherlyn Nunez Alvarado and I am a proud empowered woman. I am from Bakersfield California and I am 37 years old. I grew up in North Bakersfield going to a private school called North High School. I graduated top of my class with a master's degree in Government Career. From a very young age I've always wished to become president and now here I am hopefully able to fulfill that young girl's dream. It will be my honor to serve as the president of America and will bring my utmost respect and concentration to what has to be done. As I say this I wish that you may put your trust in me and vote for me.

# data[].attributes.body
I believe that people should not be taxed the same no matter their rate of income. People who have a poor income are not able to produce enough money to even pay for housing. Taxes are mandatory and if can't afford to pay them, you pay as much as you can and the IRS charges you the rest and an interest fee, adding more money to pay. Due to overtaxing people lose their houses and become homeless because they are not able to pay for housing and their taxes. If they have kids they have to pay for them as well. Most of our taxes go to fixing the roads and building stuff, but we barely see our money put to good use.

# data[].attributes.headline
What would happen if the rich were taxed more?

# data[].attributes.subject
What would happen if the rich were taxed more?

# data[].attributes.body
Some economists say the money that the federal government would make off this tax would decrease the deficit or could be spent to provide other services. Enacting the tax could change the way billionaires invest and narrow wealth inequality, economists say.

Increased taxes on the wealthiest individuals could lift people out of poverty, address the climate crisis, fund childcare, and create well-paying jobs Why would it be good to tax the rich?

Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7 billion a day even as at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. A tax of up to 5 percent on the world's multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.

# data[].attributes.headline
1st) Environmental problem. Trash that ends up in the Ocean is one of the main problems of Pollution.

# data[].attributes.subject
1st) Environmental problem. Trash that ends up in the Ocean is one of the main problems of Pollution.

# data[].attributes.body
Every day oceans get filled with trash, oil, and chemicals. People are the main cause of ocean pollution. Chemicals create a fertile environment for a germ called Cyanobacteria. This is a harmful algae bloom that affects the areas where fish and plant's live. to not be able to thrive in that environment.

# data[].attributes.headline
2nd) Environmental Problem. Should the government put a stop to the use of fossil fuels?

# data[].attributes.subject
2nd) Environmental Problem. Should the government put a stop to the use of fossil fuels?

# data[].attributes.body
As you may know, fossil fuels help us by providing us electricity, fuel to heat up homes, and manufacturing. But fossil fuels release harmful amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. And greenhouse gases get trapped into our atmosphere, causing global warming. If we don't stop these harmful acts many things can happen. According to clientearth, " risks further sea level rise, extreme weather, biodiversity loss and species extinction, as well as food scarcity, worsening health and poverty for millions of people worldwide." And carbon emissions will stay high.

Instead of using fossil fuels to power our homes, we can improvise and use solar power, wind, and hydro power.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a crisis that is happening in the world right now and so much food is going to waste. About 1.3 billion tons of food are going to waste which is enough to feed about 3 billion people in the world 40% of food waste happens before it gets sold off and 40% gets wasted when sold or on stock. A lot of food gets thrown away because of aesthetic reasons. People say it is “Too Ugly” to eat. All of these critical standards lead to something called food insecurity which is another big problem.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Why has the 'tax the rich' movement reemerged to take hold at this point in time?

The first question you need to answer before anything else is what exactly does 'tax the rich' mean? Taxing the rich can mean at least three things: taxing high-income earners, taxing capital income because most of the income of the super-rich comes from capital income, or taxing the stock of wealth directly. The most recent proposals by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren specifically targeted taxing wealth. There's an economic distinction between these three different forms of taxes, what they might imply both for equity considerations, and how efficient they are in terms of generating tax revenue.

For all three forms of taxation, an evaluation needs to consider the efficiency properties of the tax but also whether it actually can be implemented in practice. Currently we tax labor income, and we tax capital income, but we do not tax wealth directly in the United States, abstracting from a limited estate tax, which is a form of wealth tax.

If the government wants to tax the stock of wealth, then it has to base this tax on an accurate measure of wealth. The U.S. government does not currently collect data on wealth. To implement a wealth tax, the government would have to get into the business of collecting comprehensive information on the wealth of its citizens. This would be great for researchers like me to have good data on the distribution of household wealth in the United States. For instance, Norway has a wealth tax, and there's a ton of research based on the data that have been generated. But measuring wealth accurately in the United States is not going to be easy.

If America was going to tax the wealthy in some way, what would make the most sense in your opinion?

There's an active economic academic debate about that. On one side, there's people like Thomas Piketty, who's sort of a champion of the left, and Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley advocating for a wealth tax directly, as far as I can tell. They laid out their proposal in a recent Brookings paper, and their discussant Wojciech Kopczuk critiqued this proposal. I would be perfectly on board with the fact that you want to raise additional tax revenues from people at the very top of the wealth distribution to finance much-needed infrastructure investment, which has been too low for a long time in this country, in my view. The question to me is, Is the wealth tax the most efficient way to do so? I think it would be very hard to implement. You have to effectively measure wealth. A lot of the wealth that we are talking about is in the form of private business wealth, and therefore there's not a readily available market value for this form of wealth on which a wealth tax might be based. If you then impose a wealth tax on this form of wealth, the owners of these businesses might take all kinds of actions to artificially lower the value of this form of wealth.

Another issue is that a tax of wealth, if unilaterally imposed by one country, might lead to wealth migrating to other countries that do not tax wealth, or tax it at lower levels. If I was the government of Luxembourg or Switzerland, or in general a relatively small country with borders that are open to international capital flows, I would be very worried about this concern since it might be fairly easy to relocate wealth, especially financial or business wealth, across borders. In the U.S., I'm not sure of how big the wealth tax would have to be such that wealthy, successful entrepreneurs in the United States would relocate to, say, Mexico to avoid the tax.

Overall, I therefore think the wealth tax is perhaps not the most efficient way to raise tax revenue or to achieve redistribution because wealth is hard to measure, because of concerns about people moving their wealth elsewhere, or because of shifting economic activities to lower the value of the forms of wealth that are to be taxed.

Despite the public will and talking points of politicians, why does there never seem to be any progress on this topic?

Major tax reforms are extremely rare. If you think about big tax reforms that have been enacted, there were the Reagan tax reforms some 35 years ago, then the Bush tax reforms that were partially reversed during the Obama administration. Overall, big tax reforms are rare because once you have a status quo, there's people who benefit from that status quo who'll try to block the initiative to implement something new. This seems to be especially effective for tax changes at the top of the income or wealth distribution.

From my perspective, I think it would be more promising to reform the income tax code that we already have because that is not a fundamental departure from how we do things now. If you really want a wealth tax, you have to set up infrastructure to measure things we aren't currently measuring, which would take time. At that point, it would be clear to wealthy individuals what would be coming and would have enough time to react to that by potentially moving the wealth out of the country.

So, if I were to tax the rich more, I'd try to do it within the framework of the current income tax. There are two key elements I would highlight. The first is addressing tax loopholes in the current tax system to make sure that the tax rate people at the top of the income distribution actually pay are closer to their statutory counterpart, and second, to consider raising the top marginal tax rates on income, meaning both capital as well as labor income, to try to generate the extra tax revenue for the infrastructure investment programs that are currently being discussed.

Of course, income tax reforms will also have behavioral consequences. If you raise the top marginal rate, people might work less, people might invest less in their businesses since they get to keep a smaller share of their profits. That's all certainly possible. The question is how strong that response will be, and I think it depends on the group of people. Take LeBron James. Would he stop playing basketball as hard, would he focus less on winning, if we taxed his income at a higher marginal rate, say 50%? I don't necessarily think so. However, if you think about a private business, say a law firm or a medical practice, would they take additional clients if they know that the extra income from that client would be taxed at a higher rate? That's less clear to me.

One attractive feature with this proposal is that it would simply change tax rate within the tax system already in place and thus would be straightforward to implement. It would not change the type of information the IRS would have to collect from taxpayers. In my judgment, and given what I know about the behavioral responses of the private sector to changes in marginal tax rates, this could generate substantial additional tax revenues without harming the economy too much. That would be my way to go, and I have advocated for such a tax reform in work with Fabian Kindermann about to be published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

What's the most important thing for people to understand about this topic?

This idea of taxing the rich more has been popular for at least the last 15 years and without much action. Rather than focusing on the most grandiose ideas, in my own judgment, I think it would be good to just get started on this by reforming the current income tax code. But taking a broader perspective, my own somewhat cynical view is that there might be a sizable infrastructure spending bill, which I think is a good thing, and in fact long overdue, but that when it comes to the difficult question of how to pay for it, Washington will kick the can down the road. The outcome will be a massive increase in the government debt which is already pretty large as a share of gross domestic income.

I'm very concerned about intergenerational justice in this regard. To me it seems that the entire debate is about the conflict between the rich and the poor now, but what about future generations that we are leaving with a massive amount of bills to pay in a world where the population is not growing as fast anymore and productivity growth has slowed considerably? The future tax burden is going to be quite substantial for future generations. That is what I would be concerned about.

Intergenerational redistribution and justice are things that I would like to see discussed much more openly in this context, as opposed to always just focusing on inequality within the generations currently alive. How about future generations? The biggest potential injustice I see is leaving our kids with a rotten, overheated planet and a lot of government debt to pay for the spending programs discussed now. My first priority would be to insure that taxes are indeed raised to finance the infrastructure spending plans and to maximize the share of spending that is in fact an investment into an infrastructure for the future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Economist Dirk Krueger shares his thoughts on current proposals to tax the very wealthy and on what needs to be considered in the discussion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gun Violence Researchers & About Page – Rockefeller Institute of Government

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium is dedicated to the reduction of violence involving firearms through interdisciplinary research and analysis.

# data[].attributes.headline
Should the government repeal the  2nd Amendment?

# data[].attributes.subject
Should the government repeal the  2nd Amendment?

# data[].attributes.body
The 2nd Amendment has been the cause of more mass shootings. Ever since the Second Amendment more people have been shot and dead by guns now allowed by the Second Amendment. I think that we should repeal this law because it is safer and less of a risk of people dying. And if the law would not be repealed I would make it where it would be more strict and more background checks on the people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Benefits of 2nd Amendment Rights on American Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The following is part of the In Defense of Freedom essay series by Northwood University students. The second amendment has commonly been described as the defender of all other amendments that allow us to live as a free society. Though over the past few decades we have seen more attempts than ever by our own…

# data[].attributes.body
There are many pros and cons when it comes to guns,

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
(Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

There has always been a troubling gap between rich and poor in this country. But these days, it's grown worse.

Billionaires with unimaginable, unspendable fortunes go full years without paying any federal income taxes at all. Meanwhile, ordinary workers' wages have been stagnant for decades, and poor people are sleeping in miserable tent encampments on city streets.

For the record:

The citation for the finding that most Americans think there is too much income inequality in the U.S. should be the Pew Charitable Trusts, not the Pew Research Center.

Why are Americans not clamoring louder for fairness? Why are we so reluctant to take a reasonable share of Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos' billions of dollars in taxes and put that money to work solving the country's enormous social problems?

The way it's always been explained to me is that we Americans don't want to declare war on the rich. In fact, we identify with the ultra-wealthy, and admire them - and hope to become rich and pay no taxes ourselves.

Opinion Columnist

Nicholas Goldberg

Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches stories about Mark the Match Boy and Ben the Luggage Carrier may be 150 years old, but they're deeply rooted in our collective unconscious. We're still proselytized by ads and TV shows and get-rich-quick schemes that promise us wealth and luxury tomorrow if we play our cards right today.

But increasingly, Americans are realizing that this is a great national fantasy. The notion that with a little luck and pluck any citizen can become the next John D. Rockefeller, Warren Buffett or Bill Gates is a fairy tale.

Sure, there was a time when wages grew and the stock market climbed, and young people who went to college and found a decent job could generally feel confident about their rising expectations.

But these days are not those days. Social mobility is not America's strong suit anymore. One Pew Research Center study from 2015 found that children born into different economic circumstances "can expect very distinct economic futures."

Meanwhile, the extremes have grown more extreme. While homelessness has reached crisis proportions in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, Musk can lose $50 billion when Tesla stock falls, as it did this week, and still be worth more than $200 billion.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calculated that it would take the median U.S. worker over 4 million years to earn that much money.

In California, more than one-third of the state's nearly 40 million people live close to the poverty line. But Forbes counts 189 billionaires living in the state. Surely there comes a point where that discrepancy becomes obscene, where democracy itself is threatened by such drastic concentrations of power.

A survey released this week by the Public Policy Institute of California found that more than 6 in 10 respondents believe children in California will be worse off financially than their parents when they grow up. And 63% believe that the American dream - that if you work hard you'll get ahead - either no longer holds true or never held true in the first place.

And yes, the richest people in America often pay a lower effective tax rate than the rest of us. And sometimes nothing at all: As a report from ProPublica shows, Bezos didn't pay a dime in federal taxes in 2007 and 2011. George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Musk and others have all had years where they didn't either.

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, UC Berkeley economists, report that the super-rich - the top 0.01% of earners - paid approximately 70% of their income in taxes in 1950. By 2017 that was down to less than 25%.

That's outrageous. And it's the backdrop against which a "billionaire tax" was recently discussed in Washington.

During negotiations over the Biden administration's social spending package, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) specifically sought to tax the wealth, not just the income, of billionaires. His proposed levy on the "unrealized gains" of the very rich would have affected fewer than 1,000 of the nation's top earners.

But Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) single-handedly shot the proposal down, saying government should not "target" people who have "contributed to society" and who "create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money."

That skirmish is over. But the idea won't fade away. Most Americans say there is too much income inequality in the U.S. today, according to the Pew Research Center. (The gap is larger here, incidentally, than in any other G-7 nation.)

Wyden's approach may or may not be the right one. But it is common sense that the obscenely rich should pay a greater and fairer share. In our progressive tax system, that's not targeting anyone for being rich, it's just the way it works.

And I for one don't believe closing loopholes or raising rates or taxing wealth will make America's billionaires any less productive, or that they'll flee the country or stop "creating jobs."

Meanwhile, our thanks should go out to people like Morris Pearl, a former BlackRock executive, who argues that his own taxes, and the taxes of his fellow multimillionaires, should be higher. He recently told the New York Times: "I'm sitting here in a chaise longue in Hilton Head Island on the beach, and I pay a far lower tax rate than people that work for a living."

Sen. Manchin said, as he snuffed out the billionaire tax, that it was time for Americans to "all pull together and row together." If he wants to know how that can be done, maybe he should check in with Morris Pearl.
@Nick_Goldberg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Column: Sen. Manchin says oh no, we mustn't target the super-rich with higher taxes. But why on Earth not?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We may think any of us can become the next Bezos or Musk. But in fact, social mobility is not really a thing in America anymore. Income inequality is.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
History of Gun Control Laws
Gun control laws are just as old or older than the Second Amendment (ratified in 1791). Some examples of gun control throughout colonial America included criminalizing the transfer of guns to Catholics, enslaved people, indentured servants, and Native Americans; regulating the storage of gun powder in homes; banning loaded guns in Boston houses; and mandating participation in formal gathering of troops and door-to-door surveys about guns owned.

Guns were common in the American Colonies, first for hunting and general self-protection and later as weapons in the American Revolutionary War. Several colonies' gun laws required that heads of households (including women) own guns and that all able-bodied men enroll in the militia and carry personal firearms. Read more history...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

The Second Amendment is not an unlimited or individual right to own guns.

Further, the Second Amendment was intended to protect the right of militias to own guns, not the right of individuals to own guns. Former Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissenting opinion for District of Columbia et al. v. Heller, wrote, "the Framer's single-minded focus in crafting the constitutional guarantee 'to keep and bear arms' was on military use of firearms, which they viewed in the context of service in state militias," hence the inclusion of the phrase "well regulated militia."

Michael Waldman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, stated there is nothing about an individual right to bear arms in the notes about the Second Amendment when it was being drafted, discussed, or ratified; the US Supreme Court declined to rule in favor of the individual right four times between 1876 and 1939; and all law articles on the Second Amendment from 1888 to 1959 stated that an individual right was not guaranteed.
Read More

Pro 2

More gun control laws would reduce gun deaths.

Approximately 50% of unintentional fatal shootings were self-inflicted; and most unintentional firearm deaths were caused by friends or family members.

Five women are murdered with guns every day in the United States. A woman's risk of being murdered increases 500% if a gun is present during a domestic dispute. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 5,364 US soldiers were killed in action between Oct. 7, 2001 and Jan. 28, 2015; between 2001 and 2012 6,410 women were killed with a gun by an intimate partner in the United States.

Researchers found that a "general barrier to firearm access created through state regulation can have a significant deterrent effect on male suicide rates in the United States. Permit requirements and bans on sales to minors were the most effective of the regulations analyzed."

Gun licensing laws were associated with a 14% decrease in firearm homicides, while increases in firearm homicides were seen in places with right-to-carry and stand-your ground-laws.

More gun control leads to fewer suicides. When US gun ownership goes down, overall suicide rates drop; meanwhile, each 10 percentage-point increase in gun ownership is linked to a 26.9% increase in the youth suicide rate. In Indiana and Connecticut, after "red flag" laws to remove guns from people who may pose a threat were enacted, gun suicides decreased by 7.5% and 13.7% respectively, while suicides by other means did not decrease during the same time. A person who wants to kill him/herself is unlikely to commit suicide with poison or a knife when a gun is unavailable.

The US General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 31% of total accidental shooting deaths could have been prevented by installing safety devices on guns: 100% of deaths per year in which a child under 6 years old shoots and kills him/herself or another child could be prevented by automatic child-proof safety locks; and 23% of accidental shooting deaths by adolescents and adults per year could be prevented by loading indicators showing when a bullet was in the chamber ready to be fired.

Marjorie Sanfilippo, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Eckerd College who has researched children's behavior around guns, stated, "We put gates around swimming pools to keep children from drowning. We put safety caps on medications to keep children from poisoning themselves.... [B]ecause children are naturally curious and impulsive, and because we have shown time and again that we cannot 'gun-proof' them with education, we have a responsibility to keep guns out of the hands of children."
Read More

Pro 3

The presence of a gun makes a conflict more likely to become violent.

The FBI found that arguments (such as romantic triangles, brawls fueled by alcohol or drugs, and arguments over money) resulted in 1,962 gun deaths (59.9% of the total).

An editorial published in the American Journal of Public Health noted, "gun-inflicted deaths [often] ensue from impromptu arguments and fights; in the US, two-thirds of the 7,900 deaths in 1981 involving arguments and brawls were caused by guns." A study published in the same journal found that "the weapons used [in altercations]... were those closest at hand." And thus, according to another study, "[r]ather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance."

Common sense gun control laws can decrease the likelihood of a violent situation turning deadly. President Ronald Reagan and others did not think the AR-15 military rifle (also called M16s by the Air Force) should be owned by civilians and, when the AR-15 was included in the assault weapons ban of 1994 (which expired on Sep. 13, 2004), the NRA supported the legislation. A Mother Jones investigation found that high-capacity magazines were used in at least 50% of the 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012.When high-capacity magazines were used in mass shootings, the death rate rose 63% and the injury rate rose 156%.
Read More

Pro 4

A majority of adults, including gun owners, support common sense gun control such as background checks, bans on assault weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines.

According to a Feb. 20, 2018 Quinnipiac Poll, 97% of American voters and 97% of gun owners support universal background checks. 67% support a nationwide ban on assault weapons, and 83% support mandatory waiting periods for gun purchases.

As much as 40% of all gun sales are undocumented private party gun sales that do not require a background check (aka the "gun show loophole").

53% of all adults surveyed approve of high-capacity magazine bans. 89% of adults with a gun in the home approve of laws to prevent the purchase of guns by the mentally ill, and 82% approve of banning gun sales to people on no-fly lists.

77% of Americans support requiring a license to purchase a gun.

Don Macalady, member of Hunters against Gun Violence, stated, "As a hunter and someone who has owned guns since I was a young boy, I believe that commonsense gun legislation makes us all safer. Background checks prevent criminals and other dangerous people from getting guns."

Many would like to see the U.S. enact more laws like other countries, citing the fact that countries with restrictive gun control laws have lower gun homicide and suicide rates than the United States. Both Switzerland and Finland require gun owners to acquire licenses and pass background checks that include mental and criminal records, among other restrictions and requirements. In 2007 Switzerland ranked number 3 in international gun ownership rates with 45.7 guns per 100 people (about 3,400,000 guns total). In 2009 Switzerland had 24 gun homicides (0.31 deaths per 100,000 people) and 253 gun suicides (3.29 deaths per 100,000 people). Finland ranked fourth in international gun ownership rates with 45.3 guns per 100 people (about 2,400,000 guns total). In 2007 Finland had 23 (0.43 deaths per 100,000 people) gun homicides and 172 gun suicides (4.19 deaths per 100,000 people).
Read More

Con 1

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution protects individual gun ownership.

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution 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."

Lawrence Hunter, Chairman of Revolution PAC, stated, "The Founders understood that the right to own and bear laws is as fundamental and as essential to maintaining liberty as are the rights of free speech, a free press, freedom of religion and the other protections against government encroachments on liberty delineated in the Bill of Rights."
Read More

Con 2

Gun control laws are discriminatory and infringe on citizens' rights

Current gun control laws are frequently aimed at inner city, poor, black communities who are perceived as more dangerous than white gun owners. Charles Gallagher, Chair of Sociology at LaSalle University, stated that some gun control laws are still founded on racial fears: "Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1."

Background checks and micro-stamping are an invasion of privacy. Background checks require government databases that keep personal individual information on gun owners, including name, addresses, mental health history, criminal records, and more. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) worried that Senator Harry Reid's 2013 proposed background check legislation (the bill failed 54-46) would have allowed the government to keep databases of gun purchases indefinitely, creating a "worry that you're going to see searches of the databases and an expansion for purposes that were not intended when the information was collected." Micro-stamping similarly requires a database of gun owners and the codes their personal guns would stamp on cartridge cases. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) wrote that they would oppose any legislation that infringes "on the American people's constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance."

Gun control laws infringe upon the right to self-defense and deny people a sense of safety. The police cannot protect everyone all of the time. 61% of men and 56% of women surveyed by Pew Research said that stricter gun laws would "make it more difficult for people to protect their homes and families." Nelson Lund, Professor at George Mason University School of Law, stated, "The right to self-defense and to the means of defending oneself is a basic natural right that grows out of the right to life" and "many [gun control laws] interfere with the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves against violent criminals." A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made them feel safer and 64% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein, a gun control advocate, carried a concealed gun when her life was threatened and her home attacked by the New World Liberation Front in the 1970s.

Gun control laws, especially those that try to ban "assault weapons," infringe upon the right to own guns for hunting and sport. In 2011, there were 13.7 million hunters 16 years old or older in the United States, High-powered semiautomatic rifles and shotguns are used to hunt and in target shooting tournaments each year. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, "So-called 'Assault weapons' are more often than not less powerful than other hunting rifles. The term 'assault weapon' was conjured up by anti-gun legislators to scare voters into thinking these firearms are something out of a horror movie... [T]he Colt AR-15 and Springfield M1A, both labeled 'assault weapons,' are the rifles most used for marksmanship competitions in the United States. And their cartridges are standard hunting calibers, useful for game up to and including deer." According to a Feb. 2013 Pew Research report, 32% of gun owners owned guns for hunting and 7% owned guns for target or sport shooting.
Read More

Con 3

Gun control laws simply do not work.

Gun control efforts have proved ineffective. According to David Lampo, Publications Director of the Cato Institute, "there is no correlation between waiting periods and murder or robbery rates." Banning high-capacity magazines will not necessarily deter crime because even small gun magazines can be changed in seconds.The "gun show loophole" is virtually nonexistent because commercial dealers, who sell the majority of guns at shows and elsewhere, are bound by strict federal laws. According to a Mar. 10, 2016 Lancet study, most state-level gun control laws do not reduce firearm death rates, and, of 25 state laws, nine were associated with higher gun death rates.

Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and yet, in 2012, Mexico had 11,309 gun murders (9.97 gun homicides per 100,000 people) compared to the United States that had 9,146 gun homicides (2.97 per 100,000 people). The country has only one legal gun store (the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales), compared to at least 63,709 legal gun stores and pawn shops in the United States as of Feb. 10, 2014. Mexico's gun store is on a secure military base and customers must present a valid ID, go through a metal detector, and turn over cellphones and cameras to guards. To actually buy a gun, customers have to show proof of honest income, provide references, pass a criminal background check, prove any military duties were completed with honor, and be fingerprinted and photographed. If allowed to purchase a gun, the customer may buy only one gun (choosing from only .38 caliber pistols or lower) and one box of bullets. Between 2006 and 2010, Mexico's one gun shop sold 6,490 guns, yet as of 2012, Mexicans own about 15,000,000 guns, or about 13.5 guns per 100 people.

The main reason gun control doesn't work is because laws will not prevent criminals from obtaining guns or breaking laws. Of 62 mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and 2012, 49 of the shooters used legally obtained guns. Collectively, 143 guns were possessed by the killers with about 75% obtained legally. A Secret Service analysis found that of 24 mass shootings in 2019 at least 10 (42%) involved illegally possessed guns.

The logical conclusion is that gun control laws do not deter crime; gun ownership deters crime. A study in Applied Economics Letters found that "assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level" and "states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murders." While gun ownership doubled in the twentieth century, the murder rate decreased. Journalist John Stossel explained, "Criminals don't obey the law... Without the fear of retaliation from victims who might be packing heat, criminals in possession of these [illegal] weapons now have a much easier job... As the saying goes, 'If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.'"

More gun control is not needed; education about guns and gun safety is needed to prevent accidental gun deaths. 95% of all US gun owners believe that children should learn about gun safety. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, Inc (SAAMI), stated, "Whether in the field, at the range or in the home, a responsible and knowledgeable gun owner is rarely involved in a firearms accident of any kind." According to Kyle Wintersteen, Managing Editor of Guns and Ammo, studies show that "children taught about firearms and their legitimate uses by family members have much lower rates of delinquency than children in households without guns" and "children introduced to guns associate them with freedom, security, and recreation-not violence." [82] [85] [154]
Read More

Con 4

Gun control laws give too much power to the government and may result in government tyranny and the government taking away all guns from citizens.

57% of people surveyed by Pew Research in Feb. 2013 said that gun control laws would "give too much power to the government over the people."

The NRA's Wayne LaPierre stated, "if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it [the Second Amendment] there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny."

Concurring, Alex Jones, radio host, stated, "The Second Amendment isn't there for duck hunting, it's there to protect us from tyrannical government and street thugs... 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!"

Marco Rubio (R-FL), US Senator, speaking about gun control laws during his 2016 presidential campaign, stated, "If God forbid, ISIS visits our life, our neighborhood, our school, any part of us, the last thing standing, the last line of defense could very well be our ability to protect ourselves."
Read More

Did You Know?

1. A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made them feel safer, and 64% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer.

2. The US General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 100% of deaths per year in which a child under 6 years old shoots and kills him/herself or another child could be prevented by automatic child-proof safety locks.

3. The Centers for Disease Control listed firearms as the #12 cause of all deaths between 1999 and 2015, representing 1.3% of total deaths. They were also the #1 method of death by homicide (67.3% of all homicides) and by suicide (51.9% of all suicides).

4. Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and yet, in 2012, Mexico had 11,309 gun murders (9.97 gun homicides per 100,000 people) compared to the United States that had 9,146 gun homicides (2.97 per 100,000 people).

5. Carrying a concealed handgun in public has been permitted in all 50 states since 2013, when Illinois became the last state to enact concealed carry legislation.

6. Five women a day are killed by guns in America. A woman's risk of being murdered increases 500% if a gun is present during a domestic dispute.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Proponents say the Second Amendment is not an unlimited right to own guns. Opponents say the amendment protects individual gun ownership.

# data[].attributes.body
California has "led the way" for gun safety regulations, California Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters on Tuesday in response to the recent shootings. In 1989, California passed the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act following the killings of five schoolchildren at the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton that year. The law was nation's first ban on "assault weapons," then a new classification of firearms, which defined them as having characteristics such detachable magazine, a flash suppressor, a forward pistol grip and a thumbhole stock. The state has continually updated the law, the current iteration of which is currently the strictest in the country.

In 2016, Californians passed Proposition 63, which requires background checks for purchasing ammunition and prohibits possession of large capacity magazines. A red flag law also went into effect that year, which prevents certain people from obtaining firearms. The state employs a licensing system for gun and ammunition purchases, and bans the sale of most handguns that don't have a magazine safety or loaded-chamber indicator. It also requires safe storage of guns, and some cities require liability insurance for gun sellers.