The issue of gun control has been one of a handful of political charges topics that has been at the forefront of debate in the United States for over 30 years now. It is unfortunate that both the pro-gun and anti-gun lobby take the extremes of each side of the issue to perpetuate their cause and therefore create a situation whereas the average person is misinformed on the issue.
When the data on gun related crime and incidents is properly analyzed, it becomes very obvious that the gun, in and of itself, is not one of the roots of the problems that plague modern society. The failure of the anti-gun advocates to recognize that vast corpus of contrary scholarship reflects that fact that the " Great American Gun War" is really a culture conflict. It is less about criminology than about ideology and morality. [1].
Both sides of the gun control lobby fall back on the Second Amendment of the constitution to support their arguments. The key question in looking at the Second Amendment is whether or not the founding fathers were trying to maintain an individual citizens right to possess personal firearms or whether to allow for the State to maintain a militia.
If the authors of the constitution were not addressing individual firearm ownership in the Second Amendment then there would have been no need for the Second Amendment to begin with. Military-militia provisions are specifically outlined in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution. In discussing the Bill of Rights, James Madison, author of the Second Amendment, and his contemporaries addressed the right to bear arms in the same breath as the freedoms of speech, press, and religion. They consistently lumped these rights together under such descriptions as "human rights", "private rights", rights "respecting personal liberty", and " essential and sacred rights." [2] Madison is on record as explaining that the Second Amendment was intended to protect people against the confiscation of their own weapons.
