Ryan Quinn

The United States has 88.8 guns per 100 people, or about
270,000,000 guns, which is the highest total and per capita
number in the world. 22% of Americans own one or more guns.
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, slaves, 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.
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. A Mother Jones investigation found that high-capacity
magazines were used in at least 50% of the 62 mass shootings
between 1982 and 2012. According to the National Rifle

Association NRA, guns are used for self-defense 2.5 million times
a year.
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. In all if I have to pick, I would
say to keep the gun control in closer check and restrict more
things about. Gun control is a very serious matter that we as a
country need to look into.
According to the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation
(PIRE), in 2010, gun violence cost each person in the United
States roughly $564 and the US government $5.5 billion in lost
tax revenue; $4.7 billion in court costs; $1.4 billion in Medicare
and Medicaid costs; $180 million in mental health care for victims;
$224 million in insurance claims processing; and $133 million for
law enforcement and medic response to shooting injuries.
Background checks would 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. Lithuania has one of the
world's lowest gun ownership rates (0.7 guns per 100 people) but
its suicide rate (by any method) was 45.06 per 100,000 people in
1999, the highest suicide rate among 71 countries with available
information.