Fre tt 1 Dawson Frett Dr. Goss Comp 1 13 November 2018 The Age To Buy A Gun The topic that I'm going to be writing about is whether we should or should not raise the age to purchase a gun in the United States.
I believe that we shouldn't raise the age to legally buy a gun because the fact is that letting people have weapons at a younger age would not solve any of the problems we are currently facing in the United States. After the shooting in Parkland, Florida, people talked about raising the age limit for the longest time. Florida was the only state that did anything with the age limit after the shooting occurred. “The State of Florida raised the law so that to obtain a firearm, you have to be at least that age of 21 or older to buy a firearm. The only other states that have similar laws or have changed their laws to limit all gun sales to 21 and older are Hawaii and Illinois”(Polumbo, 2018). The results of that changes have been far from what the people want to see out of the change, Illinois is in the top ten states for gun homicides and deaths in the United States even tho they have higher gun purchase age; Hawaii has had the exact opposite of what Illinois results were, it has some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the United States, which is what people want to see but when you look at it there can be different results to the change in the law. One example of why raising the legal age to 21 wouldn’t work is because of Nikolas Cruz. “Nikolas was the shooter in the Parkland, Florida shooting, He was over 18, but at the time he wasn’t over the age of 21 when he bought the gun he used in the school shooting.
This lead toFre tt 2 people arguing that the Parkland shooting incident could have been prevented from happening if the law was different than it is now”(Polumbo, 2018) But if you look back at various other mass shootings like for instance, “The Columbine shooters were under the legal age to purchase a firearm but had a 22-year-old friend buy the gun for them to conduct the shootings.”(Polumbo. 2018). This is a good example of why changing the age limit to purchase a firearm in the United States wouldn’t help stop mass shooting or any other shootings. There are people that are of the legal age that can go out and buy guns for people who can’t get them for themselves. My second example of why we shouldn’t raise the age limit in the U.S. is that we need something to defend ourselves.
We can’t just hope for the best situations to always occur in our lives. If we get jumped in an alleyway on our way home from school or just when we are out walking around town on a nice day or walking back home from work; we have to be able to protect ourselves. If you don't have a car, you need something to help defend yourself when life-threatening situations occur; we can’t expect that we’ll magically find a piece of pipe or a wooden bat or any other object around to help defend ourselves. We should be able to know that we are safe anywhere we go and don't have to worry about getting beat up or jumped by someone on the street. The third example of why we shouldn't raise the federal age to buy a gun is that if we would put that law into place, it wouldn’t make much of a difference in the country. Yes, maybe it would make some kind of difference with the gun violence in the nation because it would maybe decrease the number of gun deaths in the U.
S. and it may lower the crime rate in the country, but the changing of the law wouldn't drastically impact the society of the United States that much because even if we do raise the age to purchase a firearm people are still going to doFre tt 3 what they’ve been doing for many years now is by having their friends that are of age to buy the gun for them so they can go out and commit crime that they did before the law was changed so I think that if we're going to change the lawe that we change it to where it going to make a drastic effect on the lives of everyone in the country and that we put in place something that will help decrease the gun violence and the number of gun deaths in the U.S. instead of just saying that we should change the age that citizens can purchase a firearm. Many might feel that we should raise the age to purchase a gun to 21 for different reasons.
They may think that many of these mass shootings done by the younger kids are because they aren’t making those good decisions, not just because of the shootings but also other aspects of their young lives. They also feel that since we have the right to vote at the age of 18 they feel that they are old enough to own a firearm. In some cases, that may be true but in most cases, it isn’t, which means that if we have that right to vote, we are voting whether or not people can own guns. By giving the right to vote before giving us the right to own a gun is giving the power of our freedom to the people who don’t understand what keeps them free.Fre tt 4 Polumbo, Brad.
“Stricter Age Restrictions on Gun Purchases Don't Make Sense.” National Review, National Review, 12 Mar. 2018, www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/stricter-age-restrictions-on-gun-purchases-dont-make-sense/.
