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Gun Violence Essay - Chris Olaniran

What makes the gun debate so challenging, is the variety of misinformation circulating on the internet about what exactly these firearms can do. Firearm specifications are not centrally published in one credible location. The damage that guns can inflict are often taken lightly by experienced shooters, as they assure non-gun advocates that they are well educated on the specifications, and that the push for gun reform is dramatic, and that people simply want change because they're intimidated by the image of large weapons. The social and political movement to arm teachers with guns is a reflection on how we desensitized the public has been made to guns due to the copious amounts of violence they can enact. Some believe making adjustments to gun control policy will have little to impact, because they believe that another weapon (existing or improvised) will become the new normal. Just as knives are more popularly used in crimes than firearms among criminals in London, England for...

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Dr Perry Lyle, PhD

Abstract It’s the violent ideology the U. S. can no longer ignore. Hate and extremist views overwhelmingly reside in the male species of humans. Then there are angry white male virgins known as "Incels" who are trolling the Internet forming social connections and are plotting violence against women and other minority groups? Disproportionately committed by men, gun violence as supported by data reveals that misogyny can be a precursor to other forms of extremism. Gun violence, and particularly mass-shootings have once again seized Americans of all political stripes as the hot-topic of the day. American’s fascination with gun ownership dates to the roots of independence from the British Crown and it’s why colonists insisted that protection to own and possess firearms be woven into the private citizens’ Constitutional rights. There are an estimated 330 million guns in America; almost one for each citizen representing approximately 42 % of the population. It makes America, per-capita, the largest privately-owned gun toting country in the world. Many surveyed claim to own four or more weapons – hardly necessary of self-defense. Yet, toxic masculinity has led to a crisis, real or perceived, in America’s schools; where school shootings are often linked to broken boys, (young adults), who frequently take a dark pathway toward revenge and power. Many of those act out on a blend of entrenched grievances, personal setbacks, depression, rage, and suicidal urges. In some cases, serious mental illnesses with a misogynist indoctrination. In the span of a week in the United States, mass-shooting events killed nine people in an upscale, downtown Oregon district of Dayton, Ohio with 27 injured. In Gilroy, California, a 19-year-old white male shooter killed three people and injured a dozen others at the communities’ Garlic festival. In the same weekend, at a Walmart super-store which anchored a shopping center, 22 people were killed and at least 25 injured. On Wednesday August 7, 2019, following the bloody weekend, President Trump visited Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas. As if to be expected, the grief torn families, and friends of the victims took a back seat from publicly hurled insults voiced by Democrats and Republican politicians over white supremacy, racism, and other divisive rhetoric of the day. These newest events have eclipsed the 58 people slaughtered with an estimated 500 injured during country-western concert shooting rampage in the bloodiest mass-shooting episode of America’s history. 64-year-old, white-male Steven Paddock was on anti-depressants according to the release autopsy report from the local corner. His motivation remains in the dark shadows of his final days on earth. Four months later, a school shooting in Parkland, Broward County, Florida, on St. Valentine’s Day, 2018 left 17 dead and scores injured by a 19-year-old former Parkland High School student. The shooter had been diagnosed with depression and treated with psychotropic SSRI’s. Cruz’s mental capacity and actions should have raised flags for potential trouble. Today, red-flag laws are popping up all over the country as America struggles with the endless, unabated, gun crisis. Keywords: Mass-shootings; Mass-murder, gun violence, misogyny and guns, diminish mental capacity and guns, school shootings in U. S.

Nils Duquet

Project SAFTE, an international research project funded by the European Commission, has addressed this knowledge gap by improving the intelligence picture on illicit gun markets across the EU and throwing light on, in particular, on terrorist access to these markets. To map this phenomenon a group of experts on international firearms trafficking have undertaken several in-depth studies on the characteristics and dynamics of illicit firearms markets in different parts of Europe, the firearms acquisition patterns of different types of terrorists across the EU and the policy that has been developed to combat these security phenomena. In concreto, eight country study were conducted in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and the UK. For these country studies the different research teams, coordinated by the Flemish Peace Institute, used a variety of sources and research methodologies. Yet, given the lack of reliable and detailed official data in most EU member states, the research design of the different country teams mainly relied on in-depth interviews with key national actors involved in the combat against illicit firearms trafficking or terrorism. During the initial phase of the research, it became clear that the phenomena under consideration could not be adequately understood without a sounder understanding of what happened in Europe’s wider neighbourhood. Therefore, in addition to the eight country studies, an assessment was made of the illicit possession and proliferation of firearms in the wider EU neighbourhood in order to address the significant nexus between the EU’s internal and external security dimensions in terms of illicit firearms trafficking. The research conducted within the framework of Project SAFTE resulted in two separate publications: a policy report and a comprehensive research volume. The policy report10 contains the systematic and comparative analysis of the main findings of the different country and neighbourhood studies, whereas this research volume contains all eight in-depth country studies and two neighbourhood studies as separate chapters. This allows the reader to gain profounder and more detailed insight into the research findings of Project SAFTE. With this book we hope to have provided further groundwork to reinforce the effort to combat illicit firearms markets in Europe and terrorist access to these markets, and have demonstrated the potential of using existing expertise and knowledge to improve the intelligence picture on these pressing security phenomena.

francesca zampagni , Nils Duquet , Francesco Strazzari

This edited volume offers an in-depth and detailed insight into Project SAFTE’s research findings. In-depth country studies were conducted in eight EU member states. The in-depth qualitative research methodology involved desk research and semi-structured interviews with key international actors and stakeholders such as Europol, EMPACT Firearms, Interpol, SEESAC and the Office of the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator. The volume sheds ligh on how illegal firearms markets are structured in the EU and shows how terrorists access these. Contributions: - Strazzari F, and Zampagni F, Between organised crime and terrorism: illicit firearms actors and market dynamics in Italy - Strazzari F, and Zampagni F, Illicit firearms circulation and the politics of upheaval in North Africa

Doctoral thesis

Nicolas Florquin

This PhD thesis uses aspects of a criminology framework to examine the extent to which research on small arms and light weapons (SALW) undertaken to support international policy is relevant and replicable beyond its immediate field of practice. Using a sample of six primarily field-research-based publications, I examine whether this research generated a greater understanding of the most problematic uses and users of SALW, and the role of these weapons as instruments of violence. With respect to uses, the application of public health and mixed social science methods has helped to reduce knowledge gaps on the effects of SALW in developing and post-conflict societies. Estimates of the costs of violence in developing countries demonstrated the instrumentality of SALW—i.e. the more serious societal impacts of firearm violence than those of violence involving other instruments. SALW research on users contributed to expanding the agenda from an initial focus on international trafficking to supply insurgent groups to a more comprehensive examination of the patterns of SALW procurement, management, control, and use among a broad range of actors able to contest the state’s monopoly of coercive force. My work on the instruments of violence contributed to an increasingly precise understanding of the most problematic types of SALW held by criminal, terrorist, and non-state armed groups in Africa and Europe. Finally, replicating field-based black-market price-monitoring techniques in conflict areas showed that ammunition prices and war-related fatalities can be strongly correlated, and provides an important lead for further examining the accessibility thesis—i.e. the link between SALW availability and levels of violence. The present thesis provides several suggestions for moving the field of practice forward. Firstly, there is a need to consolidate the lessons learned from SALW researchers’ extensive use of social science methods—including surveying—in post-conflict situations, and to analyse their implications for the measurement of SALW availability and the incidence of violence more broadly. Secondly, SALW researchers need to engage in scientifically robust evaluations of the impact of the most novel interventions, which would represent significant contributions to both SALW policy and academic research into gun violence. Finally, various streams of SALW research have highlighted the importance of ammunition supply in sustaining conflict and violence, a subject so far largely overlooked by those researching gun violence in developed countries. More expansive inquiry into ammunition flows and their relationship to violence has the potential to represent a major contribution to academic research into gun violence.

Heath Hodges

Studies in Social Justice

Sarah Blithe

Gun violence persists in the United States, claiming lives and escalating healthcare costs. This article seeks to contribute to social justice work on the “gun problem” by studying gun collectives. To understand gun culture and to identify gun violence reduction strategies, we study places where gun owners organize – legal (and sometimes illegal) settings that facilitate dialogue about gun issues. Based on participant observation and collaborative event ethnography at gun shows and a private shooting party, this analysis presents findings about the practices gun collective members use to manage stigma. We conclude that when participants in gun events attempt to subvert core stigma through everyday stigma management practices, they effectively facilitate the unfettered exchange of potentially dangerous goods, promote the invisibility of oppressive structures, and normalize violence.

In Duquet, Nils, ed. 2018. Triggering Terror: Illicit Gun Markets and Firearms Acquisition of Terrorist Networks in Europe. Brussels: Flemish Peace Institute.

In this book chapter Nicolas Florquin and André Desmarais present a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the illicit firearms market in France and the firearms possessed and used by different terrorist groups in recent years. They argue that France has a sizeable and growing pool of illicit firearms as a result of a historic tolerance towards unregistered rifles and shotguns, and because of cross-border smuggling of firearms in recent decades. This chapter demonstrates that the firearms on the French illicit market originate from a wide variety of sources and that terrorist groups have used a wide range of procurement methods to access firearms. Florquin and Desmarais demonstrate that different types of terrorist groups and networks are characterised by different firearms acquisition patterns. While jihadi terrorist networks have used their, mainly low-level, criminal connections to procure firearms, a group like ETA, for example, has instead relied heavily on targeted thefts. Tracing firearms often proves very difficult, but the authors stress the merits of doing so. The tracing of the reactivated rifles used in recent terrorist attacks, for example, has been a crucial step in building momentum to politically address the problem of easy-to-reactivate weapons from Slovakia. Available with other SAFTE case studies at https://vlaamsvredesinstituut.eu/safte/publications.html

Journal Of Multidisciplinary Research

Thomas Brezenski

On February 14, 2018, one of the most horrific school shootings took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen people, 14 of them Stoneman Douglas students, lay dead at the hands of gunman Nicolas Cruz who meticulously hunted his victims down with a semi-automatic rifle. Six years after the tragic school shootings in Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut, the unthinkable had happened again in a U.S. school. After Sandy Hook, there was outrage, and there were task forces formed and cries for greater gun control, but as the days and months passed and the spotlight faded, very little had changed with regard to mental health policy or gun control, although Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza utilized a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle during the killings of the 20 children at the school (CNN Library, 2017), and the conclusion by investigators was that Lanza had multiple mental health problems and had not received proper treatment. One of the problems was that the victims were very young, and the survivors could not adequately speak up in the aftermath. Parkland would be fundamentally different and demand a new and swift type of response that would manifest itself in a style of political public policymaking that would produce tangible results in just two weeks. This is the story of that process.

Texas Review of Law and Politics

H Sterling Burnett

I. INTRODUCTION1 The current assault on the gun industry started in late 1998 after Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell proposed that local city officials should sue the gun manufacturers to recover costs related to firearm violence in their cities2 Although Mayor Rendell put his plans for a lawsuit on hold,3 Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans and Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago ran with the idea, making New Orleans and Chicago the first two cities to file these novel lawsuits.4 To date, thirty-three similar lawsuits have been filed by governmental entities, with the most recent filings by New York City and the state of New York in June, 2000.5 Many cities could be awaiting the outcome of the cases already filed, so more lawsuits may follows.6 Lawsuits based on similar legal theories continue to be filed on behalf of private citizens as well.7 The most prominent private case to date, Hamilton v. Accu-Tek, was filed by attorney Elisa Barnes, who sued gun manufacturers on behalf of the rel...

Argumentative Essay on Gun Control

The issue of gun control is a sensitive and controversial issue that has been discussed for a long time. After a series of mass shootings, the issue has divided individuals about the best solution. On the other side of the debate, some people limit guns. On the other hand, some people oppose control and firearms control.

In particular, people who oppose gun control think that gun control will not solve the existing challenges created by guns, such as crime or mass shootings. Having the right to control guns is a successful career to prevent. All law-abiding citizens must be allowed to carry firearms to protect themselves against people who may have intentions of harming them, as in the case of mass shootings.

Control of weapons and firearms will not prevent criminals from possessing firearms. Whether there are rules Approved to restrict the use of firearms by criminals will not alone solve mass incidents shootings. This is because criminals already have the intention to disobey the law at any time they are allowed to use them in public, often using them without looking at existing laws and regulations. For this reason, gun control will not be a successful method as criminals do not work with the rules of demand and supply of goods. Instead, the main reasons which lead them to commit horrific acts like mass shootings lie in issues similar to their cognitive behaviour (McClellan, Chandler & Erdal 623). In this case, there is a need to demand a method that should be used to stop these criminals from doing or doing their jobs in the community.

Since then and now, laws have failed to put strict control measures to control the sale of firearms to criminals; there is a need to look at alternatives that lead to this problem. It should be noted that mass shootings cases are ongoing criminals are committed mainly due to the provision of illegal weapons in trade. As there is more money made in the black market, you need to understand that someone is going to make a profit by selling these illegal firearms on the black market and later remain in the wrong hands. As a result, criminals have easy access to these guns in easy access as long as they have the money spent on shopping. If criminals want a weapon, nothing will stop them from getting it.

It should be noted that criminals are looking for guns as they already have many enemies. Instead of being caught without security, criminals believe that carrying a firearm in self-defence can help them from unwanted injuries (Cooper 103). So, n trying to limit the guns to reduce the number of public shootings in the community will not be dangerous results but will leave the community facing criminals and armed criminals most of the illegal firearms purchased on the market.

Another controversy over having additional regulations imposed on gun control order reducing the number of shootings that, in the minds of criminal and criminal gangs, is increasing gun control laws. The more these efforts are made to please criminals and criminal gangs. They understand that the more restrictive gun laws are enacted, the easier it becomes for citizens to protect themselves wherever they are attacked. Citizens will not be able to protect themselves from people who intend to harm them on a large scale. For the record, the regions allowed more and more Citizens armed with guns appear to have lower crime rates and higher gunfire than in the past governments that have suppressed the right of self-determination of their citizens.

It should be understood that controlling and limiting weapons to the public for weight loss the shooting only affects law-abiding citizens. This rule, however, does not apply to criminals and gangs. Instead, if there is or is no ban or control of firearms, criminals have methods to access these guns and use them for their evil purposes. Existing rules and regulations gun laws have no power to regulate or reduce the sale of illegal firearms gangs and criminals. The state of Chicago over the incident does not allow the sale of firearms (Siegel 1123). Shooters can purchase guns, shotguns, and ammunition in this scenario The ID of owners. As a result, the Chicago Area is one of the shopping areas guns are hard work. This is part of a string of mass shootings, crime, and violence that appear locally in contrast to places with concrete steps like Chicago.

People who want to buy a gun first get their back checked and then wait for a month before legally carrying a firearm. However, in the state of Chicago, where it is difficult to find a gun, honestly, it is funny that it is a situation where it is easy to get a gun illegally. For example, in this case, there are thousands of illegal firearms on the streets, and most of them are unregistered. The tendency for guns to enter the roads every month is worrying despite the steps I have been set to limit the extent to which individuals can legally obtain firearms.

Another incident that showed contradictory evidence of attempts to control and prevent guns to prevent mass shootings can be seen n England. 1997 changes imposed on the total ban on firearms and legalizing people’s guns worsened things. Since then, This regulation, considering the increase in crime on the streets of London, unlike where there was a permit for people to own guns and use guns legally (Khimn 14). Although England is considered the country with the strongest laws in existence to control guns in public, the law is not just about creating fraud where people don’t just stop they feel safe but also placed in the hands of criminals who are in a terrible situation whenever encounters with these gangs take place on the streets. This is mainly due to the resident’s inability to defend themselves and unarmed whenever confronted by criminal gangs.

Another shocking evidence is that after two years of enacting this law in England, prices of e-crime have increased by 40 per cent, and crime rates have risen to 53%. Okwe during the period 1997 to 2001, crime rates doubled in England. Individually in London, they are six times more likely to be robbed at gunpoint than living in New York. A look at 13% of burglary incidents in the U.S. He pointed out that burglars are more afraid of armed homeowners than the law itself. In England, burglaries have been reported five times as many cases in New York (McDonald, Steven & William 80). The use of control and restriction guns in England created unintended consequences such as lawlessness on the roads and increased crime rates on its streets (Khimn 15). Criminals in England were like that due to this system of law. They have been promoted and can now openly engage in their illegal activities and crimes with no fear that the public will return with the same level of guns.

The British case has taken its toll on the U.S. states that have passed such laws in the past. In the provinces that have passed additional rules to restrict gun control, these gun laws have not been very effective in reducing the incidence of mass shootings and other crime . For example, of the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 are at the top. At murder levels. New York state, despite its strict gun laws, is also considered to be more than 20% of the world’s total number of road robberies (McClellan, Chandler and Erdal 625). The ban on gun laws in Washington D.C. is another illustrative example that the state has always had very high murder rates and a high rate of crime and robbery than in provinces that did not impose strict gun laws on citizens.

In short, it appears in the arguments presented above that they have full guns that are not related to reducing the incidence of mass shootings and crime. There are the opposite relationships observed in provinces with strict gun laws and crime incidents, and armed robbery is the exact measurement in these cities. To achieve this, effective strategies are needed to end mass shootings. Rather than using a captioning method, guns are public. Preventing mass shootings requires more intervention than limiting gun laws in public. Increasingly, gun laws have been seen as ineffective in solving this problem.