In ancient Greece when someone committed a murder the weapon was destroyed because the Ancient Greeks believed that fate was decided by the gods so the murder was not as responsible for the crime as the weapon itself. Instrumentality when used in reference to weapons is the hypothesis that the increased availability of weapons in a certain area also increases that areas likelihood of weapon based offences. Essentially the increased availability of guns increases the chances that a criminal will choose a gun as their weapon of choice for committing crimes, not to mention this also increases the range of crimes this criminal can initiate. The result of this is of course the intensification of violence, simply put more guns equals more gun crime (Cook, 1991; Zimring & Hawkins, 1997).
There are also theories that suggest that increased gun availability decreases crime because it empowers the general public and discourages criminals from targeting innocent people that could be carrying a gun thus shifting the balance of power if the aggressor is unarmed or using a knife but further complicates things if they too have a gun. This obviously does nothing to address the fact that this will no doubt increase gun related violence as a whole because two guns don’t make a right, you’re just increasing the likelihood of someone being shot and killed. Gun control is without a doubt a tentative issue which should be dealt with in a way that preserves people’s right to defend themselves but also preserves human life. We live in an age where children use guns to settle arguments, something has to be done, but who’s really at fault? If a child shoots another child, that child has no concept of right and wrong or life and death and the parents need to stop blaming guns for their own failings, the problem isn’t that guns exist it’s that parents are unaware of their children possessing them or that they just don’t care that their child is having problems at school.
Britain is one of the toughest countries in the world when it comes to gun regulation. After the Dunblane massacre, UK law had banned all private ownership of handguns. There has never been a ‘gun culture’ in Britain on par with the U.S but there were, in Britain 200,000 legally registered handguns before the ban. Anyone found in possession of illegal firearms can face up to ten years imprisonment and extremely heavy fines..
"It was one of the most shocking things that has ever happened in this country and it united the country in a feeling that we had to do something," Gill Marshall Andrews, of the Gun Control Network, told CNN. "And I don't think that it would have been possible to make the kind of progress that we have made without that tragedy”
Near the start of the ban it seemed to be quite effective, the crimes involving guns rose during the late 1990’s in England and Wales actually peaking at 24,094 offenses in 2003/04. Since the number has fallen each year. According to official crime figures in 2010/11 11,227 offenses were reported. Despite this Britain’s gun laws have been under constant scrutiny, in 2010 12 people were killed in a four hour shutting spree in Cumbria, northern England. A Brighton University Professor of criminology and Member of the Gun Control Network, Peter Squires claims that since the Dunblane massacre there has been a small but significant decline in the use of firearms. The figures aren’t everything but "the murder rate has fallen and all the indicators are moving in the right direction."
"Any weapon can be misused in a crime. Gun control will never be a complete solution to events like the mass shooting we saw in Connecticut. The swamp of gun use has not been fully drained and while tighter gun control removes risk on an incremental basis, significant numbers of weapons remain in Britain."
The conclusion is although decreasing the amount of guns or banning certain types of guns may slightly decrease the amount of gun violence, any weapon can be used to commit violence, the root cause of violence is more important than taking away the tools used to commit violence.
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