Some Americans believe that gun control laws have reduced the crime rate in the United States while other citizens argue that these laws infringe on constitutional rights and have not reduced the crime rate. This paper explores both sides of this argument. We should perhaps here define gun control, which is simply a collection of efforts to reduce the amount of violence caused by legal and illegal use of firearms through the regulation of both gun ownership and gun use. Second perhaps only after abortion the issue of gun control is one of the politically explosive and divisive political issues in the United States today in no small part because there is so little real possible common ground for the two sides
