Rahel Pommerenke and Luke Walker debate this issue. The order of printing was determined by the flip of the coin. Please be sure to read BOTH sides.

YES! by Rahel Pommerenke

In 2012, 72.75 percent of murders were committed with a firearm. Gun laws in the United States are too loosely defined, and although the second amendment of the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting guns, the ownership and handling of firearms should be more finely regulated by the government. Their role is not only to govern us, but also to protect us from potential dangers.
A controversial question that pops up is: do citizens need to own private firearms, and if they do, shouldn’t those weapons be registered? Gun registration laws exist in most states, but Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Vermont. In Missouri, the legal age to buy a gun without parental consent is 18 for long guns as well as hand guns. If the firearm is bought from a registered gun dealer, the weapon must be registered and a background check must be completed before the purchase can be finalized.
There are various reasons to own a gun, such as hunting, recreational purposes, government forces such as federal forces, as well as to protect private property. For every one hundred people that live in Missouri, there are 88.9 registered guns.
According to fbi.gov, “Before ringing up the sale, cashiers call in a check to the FBI or to other designated agencies to ensure that each customer does not have a criminal record or isn’t otherwise ineligible to make a purchase.”
The purchase will be denied if the consumer has been convicted of a crime and sentenced to more than a year in prison is a fugitive from justice, abuses controlled substances, has a mental defect, has been admitted into a mental institution, resides in the United States illegally, has been dishonorably discharged from the military, has renounced their United States citizenship, has had a restraining order placed against them or has been convicted of domestic violence.
The FBI site continues to explain that, “The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, is all about saving lives and protecting people from harm—by not letting guns and explosives fall into the wrong hands.”
This enables the purchase of guns from private parties, who are not required to complete background checks or see the identification, simply because they claim not to sell firearms.
“They are quick and convenient and their anonymity will attract those at their premium, but these same attributes make them the principal option for a felon or other prohibited person,” Garen Wintemute, director of the Emergency Medical Department in Sacramento, CA, said in Private-Party Gun Sales, Regulation, and Public Safety, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The undocumented gun traffic occurs in forty percent of all gun purchases. To stop the firearms falling into the wrong hands, all gun sales, private and federal, should be required to pass a background check as well as be registered.
According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “Firearm registration laws create comprehensive records of firearm ownership, which include a full description of each firearm and identify the owner.”
The common goal is to protect oneself and the community that one lives in with or without guns. The federal regulations such as the background check and gun registration are prohibited from sharing private information other than within the FBI, according to the Privacy Act of 1974. These safety measures are still far from unconstitutional.
“Our mission is to prevent terrorism, reduce violent crime and protect the public. With respect to firearms, ATF works to take armed, violent offenders off the streets and to ensure criminals and other prohibited persons do not possess firearms,” Carl J. Truscott the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said in the letter from the director in the Federal Firearms Regulations Reference Guide.

No! by Luke Walker

In today’s culture, guns are often very demonized. With anti-gun culture and groups who support regulation, America is doomed. The right to bear arms was such a fundamental right that the founding fathers found it important enough to be in the Bill of Rights. Guns, whether you like them or not, are here to stay. The worst thing about the gun culture we live in today is people are so dead set on getting guns off the street and out of law abiding citizens hands that they would use means that wouldn’t work effectively. Some are so radical that they think that all guns need to be seized by the federal government. Some are almost reasonable in suggesting that all guns be registered. That doesn’t need to happen as 1.) It will do nothing to prevent crime or shootings, 2.) It is a huge overreach of government control and finally, 3.) registration leads to confiscation.
A gun is a gun, it doesn’t matter if it’s registered or not. In the same breath, an unregistered gun can commit a crime the same as an registered one. In Boston, Cleveland, and California, registration of so called “assault weapons” is required by law. Their compliance rate? Not even 1 percent. Even when registration is required, it is not effective. According to a Congressional Research Committee, there are an estimated 310 million guns in the United States. The FBI estimates that 250-270 million of these are registered. That leaves approximately 40-60 million unregistered. It’s also very interesting to note that 78 percent of gun related crimes were committed with unregistered guns. Not even 1 percent of crimes committed with firearms are by legal gun owners with registered guns. This just goes to show that gun registration is an ineffective tool.
The government was not intended to babysit the people of America. It was intended to protect the rights that it was founded upon. One of these rights is the fundamental right to bear arms. By passing laws that limit and regulate sales, the federal government is undermining one of its original intentions. With every law passed that puts restrictions and regulations on guns, the government is further distancing itself from its brilliant founding fathers intentions, but more importantly from the people who are the ones that it is working for.
While I don’t like Franklin D. Roosevelt as a president, I do like his quote on government responsibility that says “I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people and that I have been given their trust.” With this in mind, the citizens should be the one who decide what laws and regulations should be placed upon them. According to a poll CNN took in 2011, 49 percent of Americans thought that protecting gun rights was important. Americans are for protecting their rights, rather than having them taken away. Therefore, the U.S. government should not be doing anything to implement stricter gun registration laws. The government was made to ensure rights to people, not slowly regulate them away, precisely what extensive gun regulation would do.
My final point many believe to be a conspiracy theory. Registration, in fact, does lead to confiscation. Let’s use progressive Canada for example. The country implemented a gun registration system in which people had to enter all long guns (rifles, shotguns, ARs). In 2011, a gun that resembled an AK, but shot a .22 caliber bullet, instead of the bigger 7.62x 39 that an AK usually shoots, was deemed illegal. A letter was sent to all the owners of that gun that read, “You are required by law to return your firearm registration certificates, without delay, either by mail to the address shown in the top left corner of this page or in person to a peace officer or firearms officers. You have 30 days to deliver your firearms to a peace officer, firearms officer of Chief Firearms Officer or to otherwise lawfully dispose of them,” and was sent by the Canadian Firearms Center. This is just one example of many of registration leading to confinstaction.
There are 600 Federal gun laws on the books. To me, that is 600 too many. Sure, guns have evolved with technology, but does that warrant a need to regulate them into the dirt? No. Gun registration does not need to be in effect, as it has relatively no effect on crime. Registration is a useless tool to curb gun violence.