The American Gun Culture

             I decided to talk about an important subject to me. Actually, it is the only reason why I wouldn’t go to the USA. I am going to talk about the American gun culture.

I think it is a really important subject because the rates of murders which involve a firearm are very high. Those rates are due to the fact that it is too easy to get an arm in the USA.

To understand why it is so easy to get one, we must go backward in time and especially in 1791 when the Bill of Rights was signed. It contains articles and amendments and among them, there is the second amendment.

This second amendment was drafted at a time when communities were moving westward and needed guns to hunt and protect their families from highwaymen and Native Americans. Therefore bearing an arm was useful and necessary. But today, in modern America, the law still allows citizens to buy, to bear and to use a firearm. The offense is to prevent someone from having a gun. The thing is that guns and firearms are part of the American grounds and the American culture.

What is most shocking to me is that some associations promote the use of firearms. For example the NRA: the National Rifle Association which is the most important one. It was created a little time after the Secession War (1871) by officers of the US Army who realized that their soldiers lacked of skills while they used their arms. So they created it to train them and be more efficient in battlefields.

Now days, the NRA promotes the legal use of firearms and sponsors a lot of training and education programs for users.

In my opinion, the second amendment was useful during wartime but today it’s not helpful to get a firearm at all. I can understand that it is thanks to firearms that Americans won their independence but today they are just the causes of a high rate of murder.

Someone said to me once that maybe the problem wasn’t the arms but the ones who hold them. So I can agree with the fact that American people can have serious problems but in France too we have problems and we don’t kill so much. You will say that it is because we don’t have the equivalent of the second amendment and I answer that fortunately we don’t because we’ll end up like Americans. If it wasn’t  so easy to get an arm, there will be fewer murders.  I think that it is “easier” to defend oneself from a knife or a baseball bat than from a bullet shot.

Ludivine.