Ten Amendments: The Right To Keep And Bear Arms

The United States Constitution was created on September 17, 1787 as the supreme law of the land. This document outlines the ten amendments which guarantee certain rights that American citizens will always have. One of these freedoms and possibly the most important is the right to keep and bear arms. As written in the Constitution, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” (U.S. Constitution). Whatever the purpose these guns are meant to serve it is clear that the right to own them cannot be impaired. George Washington once said,
Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty, teeth and
In Wilson vs. Arkansas the decision was that, “To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm . . . is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege” (Wang, Scott). This decision by the Arkansas Court system shows that any law that restrict firearms is unconstitutional. Another decision by the Texas court system concludes the same thing,
The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the "high powers" delegated directly to the citizen, and `is excepted out of the general powers of government.' A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power. (Wang,
This however is not so due to the fact most people that commit violent crimes do not use a gun that they obtained legally. Of the guns used in violent crimes 39.6% were obtained from a friend or relative, 39.2 % from the street or an illegal source, 0.7% at a gun show, 1.0% from a flea market, and 3.8 % from a pawn shop (Olmstead, J. S.). All of these circumstances do not require the criminal to go through a background check which would most likely not allow them to obtain the weapon. With these numbers it only leaves 8.3% of criminals obtaining their guns legally (Olmstead, J. S.). This shows that by making it harder to obtain weapons it only hurts the law abiding citizens from being able to protect themselves. Another statistic that shows allowing people to have a gun is not bad can be seen in Lott’s book. He reports that only 0.015% of permits for concealed carry weapons have been revoked and of those very few were due to a crime committed with the licensed weapon that resulted in a fatality (Lott