Quantitative Reasoning

Quantitative Reasoning

Introduction

Incidents related to gun control have increased a lot in the recent past with the number of killings going sky high. The recent debate on gun control started after the incident in a movie theater on July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado that killed 12, 10 of them on the spot and injured 58 also with every injured getting shot (http://edition.cnn.com). The problem being discussed is possession of guns that results in gun related crimes including homicides (Egendorf, 2006). If stricter laws are made making it harder to acquire guns for criminals and mentally ill people, then gun related crime will also go down a lot. There are answers to all the concerns raised by people having anti-gun control opinions.

Gun control issues has been a topic of concentration for many debates however many of people are unaware of its importance. According to a survey performed by National Education Association in 2003, more than three thousand children were shot in 2002 in US. This means that with every three hours, a child dies due to gunfire (Correa, 2008). The survey also concluded that these death tolls were twelve times greater than the combined figures of twenty five developed countries. These issues have brought a matter of concentration for public debates time to time as unpleasant events occurs, for example, gun control issue was discussed heavily when there was a shooting occurred at Columbine High School (Kleck, 2007). Moreover, recent shooting that occurred at Brooklyn City Councilman brought a sufficient resistance for weapon handling. Besides these variations of public interests in Gun Control, this issue must be taken in consideration and awareness should be developed. Gun control policies developed by the government are weak. The point of our concentration is what effects gun control has on the crime rates. Some researchers agree that crime rates falls if the government imposes strict gun control policies (Lott, 2008). However, others have proved the crime rates increased dramatically with strict gun control policies. Talking about America, it has been observed that people voted significantly for gun control, but the government failed to create any legislation related to this issue.

Background

The idea that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism developed in the 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin have argued that juvenile delinquency is essentially a form of social criticism. The theories advanced by Cloward, who has spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter provided an intellectual basis for many social programs of the time. Since the Mobilization for Youth in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1963 by the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity through a variety of assistance projects at work, their ideas have been transformed into policy (Correa, 2008).

Human Rights Watch in a report claimed that although the vast majority of the country's drug users are white, black people - representing 12.8 percent of the total U.S. population - constitutes 54 percent of those imprisoned for drug offenses ...