No person in the United States needs to have a handgun, and in fact, nobody needs to have a gun in their home at all. Our ridiculously violent and murderous culture needs to have a serious, ongoing discussion about gun control which should begin at this starting point: gun ownership by private citizens in the US needs to be phased out entirely. Any other perspective on this subject would be the same as if, for example, people were going to argue that slavery should only be discontinued gradually. Like gun ownership, owning other human beings was never morally correct, and neither is making weapons with the power to kill huge groups of people, or only one at a time, freely available to virtually any citizen. At some point in time, if the United States even begins to approach something resembling civilization, people will look back on those people who defend the right to carry concealed weapons in the same way that we regard Nazi strategists such as Joseph Goebbels (Lessenberry.)

Beside the police, no one needs to be carrying guns, and to the argument that hunters need their weapons to shoot game, as long as they keep their weapons locked up at a club or lodge, that argument can be made legitimately. However, there is no case for needing guns in one’s home. After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, it was easy for people to blame the mother of the emotionally disturbed shooter for allowing him to keep a collection of guns in the home. If he had not had access to guns in his home, he would not have succeeded in killing six adults and 20 elementary school children. Certainly, changing the laws and practices about guns in the United States will be no easy task, because people in the US have spent years being deluded and deluding themselves that guns make them safe (Lessenberry.)

For most of the 21st century, the machine that has been most likely to kill an American citizen has been the automobile; car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, which is the most recent year for which data is available (LaFrance.) These figures have been compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. However, in the US, firearms killed nearly the same number of people–32,251–in 2011, according to the Centers For Disease Control. In fact, in 2015, deaths from guns are expected to soar past car deaths. The CDC data indicates that in 2015, guns will kill a greater number of Americans under the age of 25 than cars. Already, more than one fourth of the teenagers who are 15 years of age and older, who die of injuries in the US are killed in gun related crimes, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (LaFrance.)

The biggest objection to not only banning guns in America, but to implementing any regulations at all has been the fact that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. However, although the NRA claims to know exactly what the Founding Fathers intended, there is actually no way for the Founding Fathers to have foreseen exactly what the United States would look like in regards to firearms in the year 2015. They clearly intended guns to be available for use against a government that was acting as tyrants, such as the British monarchy in the 1600s and 1700s, when they were imposing taxes and implementing all types of limitations and overbearing rules on the colonists. The British had their own firearms, and were ready to use them against the colonists if there were any signs of unrest or protest, so it made sense during that particular era for the colonists to have guns to protect themselves and to arm themselves against any sort of aggression by the oppressors.

That is not the case in modern-day United States, although the NRA would have you believe that the government is gearing up to take away everyone’s guns in order to confiscate them and use them against the people of the nation. This argument holds no relevance to the United States in modern times, because there is no chance that the government is going to try to take over the control of it’s citizens and impose a dictatorship or tyranny on them. This action exists only in the minds of conspiracy theorists, the militias who believe that the US is currently only one step away from imposing a military-type controlling government. According to the NRA, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (Top 30 Reasons to Oppose Gun Control.) In fact, guns do not go off by themselves; it takes people to be holding them, cleaning them, or aiming them for them to be fired and end up killing or harming other people. No, Americans do not need to arm themselves with guns, and the open access to firearms has only demonstrated that there is virtually no such thing as “responsible” gun ownership since wherever there is a gun, there is bound to be another death.