ow in caliber, and made of inferior materials, they only cost a few dollars, so anyone who wanted to commit a crime can afford to buy one. (Dolan 53-54) Guns are not only useless, but also are dangerous to kept at home. Guns are not very useful for self protection since 90 percent of all break-ins are committed when tenants are away. The guns they keep for self-protection are usually stolen. However, a gun kept for protection is six times more likely to kill someone you know rather than an attacker. Seventy percent of the people killed by handguns are shot by relatives or friends. A lot of people died in the Vietnam War, but there were more people killed by guns in the United States at the same period of time. There were fifty-eight thousand soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen killed in Vietnam, but three hundred thousand people were killed in the United States by guns!(Dolan 53-54). To keep the people in this nation away from the fear of misuse of guns, the first federal laws were passed in the early 1900s and dealt with both firearms and explosives. In 1927, Congress passed the Mailing of Firearms Acts, which prohibited all but certain people from sending a "concealable" weapon through mailing. As the time passed, there were more and more problems caused by guns, so we need new standards for our society. Under present law, a customer's name and the serial number of the gun are recorded by the dealer when he or she purchases a gun. That information will only be traced within the state. If the gun was used in a crime in other states, that state will have little or no ways of knowing where it came from. In this case, 90 percent of the guns used in crimes are purchased out of state. Another advantage of extending the control to federal lever is to prevent the stolen legal gun into illegal gun. Studies have shown that 35 percent of the guns used in crimes are obtained from pawnshops(Dolan 76-77, 80-81).As Edward Kennedy, the Senator of ...
