My idea for the persuasive essay is to have the claim be something like the following: Additional gun restrictions won’t lead to a significant drop in violent crime rates.
While this may seem counter intuitive at first, there’s quite a bit of evidence to support the notion that violent crime rates are not greatly related to gun restrictions. For instance, despite California being the state with the strictest gun laws, it holds two of the top ten big cities with the highest violent crime rates, being Oakland at third place and Stockton at eighth. On top of this, Baltimore holds the sixth spot on this list despite Maryland being the seventh strictest state when it comes to gun laws.
If violent crimes seem to broad a classification, FBI data from 2011 tells much of the same story. By ranking states by gun homicide rates and comparing them to the ten strictest states with gun regulation, only two of the top ten strictest states appear on the bottom ten states by homicide rate. Only four of the ten strictest states appear in the top twenty-five states, meaning the majority of them aren’t even below average for the United States.
There are also many misconceptions about the ease of legally obtaining a gun, that is, it is much harder than most initially think. There is a long, arduous process of legal papers and background checks one must go through to legally obtain a firearm. Illegal ways to obtain firearms wouldn’t be affected by more strict gun laws, making them effectively useless in this regard.
Another interesting point is that the US and Canada have comparable gun laws, and yet their gun violence rates are drastically different. In the year of 2012 there were 8,813 murders involving a firearm in the United States, while in Canada that number was only 172. This means this problem is a mainly US problem, or something about the United States is causing this amount of violence.
There is evidence linking socioeconomics to gun violence, which would create a possible cause of these ineffective gun restrictions. To be more specific, many of the cities with the highest rates of violence are also the cities with the highest poverty rates. However, I am unsure as to whether this should be included in my persuasive essay or if I should focus solely on the gun law side of things.
I believe the argument can be made that more gun laws won’t significantly reduce violent crime rates, and I would like feedback on how to better target or reform my topic to make it more clear. Thank you