Gun Control pt 2

In 1836, Colt invented the repeating revolver. This revolver could shoot up to six times without needing to be reloaded, which was an amazing development. The Colt .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol became the official handgun for the United States army for 50 years. Later, Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson manufactured a sidearm that fired a fully self-contained cartridge in 1852. They became famous for the .375-Magnum revolver, the .44-Magnum revolver and the 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. Smith and Wesson sold the patent to Oliver Winchester who, in later years, founded the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
In the 1860’s, American’s owned 750,000 pistols, 400,000 shotguns, and 500,000 rifles. From 1899 to 1945, American’s bought more than 44 million guns, and private Americans owned 220 to 230 million guns, 70 million of which were handguns.
Today, People buy 4.5 to 5 million new guns each year, and thirty to forty percent of American homes have guns. Gun makers made around 5 million firearms in 1994 and American gun ownership has doubled in 30 years, despite the laws.
In 1997 something drastic happened. England completely banned handguns and confiscated them from permit holders. By 2000, England had the worlds’ highest violent crime rate, and it was twice what the United States had. A 2002 report of England’s National Crime Intelligence Service found, “Britain has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world, yet it appears that anyone who wishes to obtain (illegally) a firearm will have little difficulty in doing so.” To this day, England still will not give up its stand on gun control.
In the United States, however, gun laws have remained more lax. In the 1973 court case of United States vs. Miller, two suspects in a bank robbery were arrested for possession of a sawed-off shotgun. Sawed-off shotguns were illegal under the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. The presiding judge said that the NFA violated the second amendment, and the case went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court unanimously declared there to be no problem between the NFA and the second amendment . “[sic] No evidence that sawed-off shotguns had any reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”
The District of Columbia passed an ordinance in 1976 that made it illegal for residents to keep and own handguns in their homes. It also regulated that rifles and shotguns are to be kept unloaded and disassembled at all times. Dick Heller filed a lawsuit against this ordinance in 2008 (DOC vs. Heller), because he applied for a permit to a handgun and was denied. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the second amendment guarantees people can have, own and keep firearms in their homes.