The Big Barriers to Gun Control in America

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The shooting happened Tuesday at an elementary school in the town of Uvalde, Texas, and resulted in the… death of 19 children and two adults has reopened the arms control debate in the United States. However, a broad sector’s claim to the right to bear arms, both in terms of idiosyncrasy and legal, weighs against any cuts.

The ex-president Barack Obama he placed special emphasis during his tenure on the need to restrict access to weaponsespecially for potentially dangerous people, with symbolic speeches like the one he gave with tears in his eyes after the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.

“In the name of God, when are we going to stand up to the gun lobby,” current president Joe Biden also emotionally pleaded Tuesday night, a proponent of turning “pain” into “action” to take measures that, to his opinion, to be “common sense”.

The big ‘lobby’ in favor of gun ownership is the National Rifle Association (NRA), but he’s not alone. In the political field, he mainly has support within the Republican Party and restored some of the ground lost during Donald Trump’s time in the White House.

Those who are against possible restrictions rely on the Second Amendment to the Constitution“Since a well-ordered militia is necessary for the security of a free state, the people’s right to have and bear arms must not be violated.” In order to suppress or change it, it is necessary to meet a number of difficult-to-reach conditions.

Thus, any amendment to the text passed in 1788 and to which the Second Amendment was added in 1789 would require the support of two-thirds of the members of both houses of Congress, as well as three-fourths of the states of Congress. country (38 ).

There is a second option, hitherto unknown in United States history: that two-thirds of the states convene a constitutional convention.

Year 2008 marked a before and after in the arguments of those who defend the right to bear arms. Until then it was understood that citizens as such had no individual rights, but that it was up to the local, state and federal authorities to regulate this aspect.

However, everything changed with the Supreme Court ruling in the District of Columbia v. Heller case. This citizen had disputed the constitutionality of the prohibition on the possession of weapons in Washington, considered the most restrictive in the country, and Supreme Court justices agreed with him, affirming individual rights.

“The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm, even if not employed by a militia, and to use that weapon for traditionally legal purposes, such as self-defense in the home,” the judges said.

social division

Defenses to bear arms are mainly entrenched in the southern states of the United States, while nationally the population remains divided. The Gallup company, in its most recent survey (October 2021), indicates that 52% of citizens are demanding stricter laws, compared to 35% who advocate maintaining the current ones and 11% who demand to be even more lax.

To this day, it’s not even clear how many guns there are in the United States today, with varying estimates being between 270 and 310 million. 42% of Americans have a gun in your own home, according to Gallup research.

As for their owners, polling stations agree that: they are mostly men -three out of four, according to the Pew Research Center- and whites -more than 80%-, which means that this group possesses a quantity of weapons that practically doubles its representativeness within the North American population in general.