Political Action: Gun Control - Essay Example

Firstly, by joining a national citizen activist group called Americans for Responsible Solutions, the intention was to take head on the influential gun lobbyist in terms of their coverage and resources. This involved constantly getting on the phone and email to contact legislators, engaging in online discussions, blogs, as well as Twitter communications.
The objective was to act serenely and rationally to make the legislators understand that there will be electoral repercussions for not voting for meaningful gun control measures. Secondly, before the congressional votes on existing plans took place, there was a massive and coordinated booking of appointments from the representative's and senators' offices.

The intention was to let them know the feelings and emotions driving genuine gun control measures. Thirdly, protest marches also formed a major aspect of demanding meaningful legislation, and with the support of citizen activist groups referred to as Washington CeaseFire, protest marches, and demonstrations were organized near Capitol Hill and state legislators’ buildings to commemorate victims while demanding legislative responses to transform the tears into concrete action. Furthermore, television ads urging Congress to take steps without delay were prepared from state to state, and this involves contributing amounts even less than $5 per person. The signing of online petitions calling for the enactment of gun laws was meant at augmenting social media campaigns as it is a useful resource for dealing with anticipated counter-petition (Carroll, 20). Hence, lawmakers should be made to understand that assault weapons or any high-capability ammunition magazines, do not have any place in the streets and communities

The key issue driving such approaches is that the loopholes within current gun ownership and registration laws have enabled criminals and individuals with suicidal mental health to acquire weapons. In particular, almost 40% of legal firearm sales occur at informal places like the Internet, gun shows, or from private sellers. Existing figures show that firearms are responsible for nearly 30,000 deaths every year both accidental and intentional shootings (Carter, 6). Therefore, such buyers are not subjected to any federal background checks. This then calls for anti-gun loophole legislation on the purchase of semiautomatic weapons to make it rather hard for criminally minded and dangerously mentally ill people with suicidal thoughts to purchase guns and ammunition. Mental-health practitioners should be mandated to reveal patients who should not own firearms to an FBI-administered background-check scheme.

Therefore, common sense legislation should entail enforcing criminal background checks for every firearm sold. Secondly, there should be a ban on assault weapons, as well as high-capacity ammunition magazines from citizens. Thirdly, it is crucial to define gun trafficking to be a federal crime having significant penalties, especially for straw purchasers. A perfect gun-control initiative does not present severe barriers to public possession of firearms for valid principles, but effectively hinders the use of firearms in committing crimes. Given that after any shooting massacre, politicians do rise in fury but then later become numb to countermeasures, the perfect moment for achieving a meaningful policy against gun violence is now since the wounds from recent gun violence tragedies are still fresh. Read More