The Second Amendment reads, "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" (Bowman). The Second Amendment was originally ratified on the thought of the danger of national security being threatened (Bowman). The United States were just being formed and had just come out of a great war to gain their freedom. The American Army was essentially comprised of many small militias. These were volunteer groups of citizen-soldiers who were mostly untrained farmers and town citizens. The right to assemble a militia and own firearms provided the new country an army. When the Founding Fathers granted the undeniable right to firearms the only gun known was the flintlock, which was very inaccurate and not nearly as deadly as the guns today. Two hundred years later guns are much cheaper to manufacture, easy to use, highly accurate, and incredibly lethal (Bowman).

	The writers of the Constitution were thinking of foreign invaders when they ratified the Second Amendment, but they were also thinking of internal conflict.  The Constitution prohibits the government from suppressing its citizens mainly with the Second Amendment. If the government could prohibit personal firearms, they could demand cooperation through force and threats. The Founding Fathers did not want the great country they had just created to turn into a tyranny like the monarchy of England that they came from (Bowman). In 1871 two Union officers founded the National Rifle Association in order to protect their personal right to firearms. To this day it is one of the biggest and most powerful non-government organizations that stands to protect firearm rights, hunting rights, promote shooting as a sport, educate firearm safety (Lee).

	Ever since the ratification of the Second Amendment politicians and citizens have been lobbying to cut down on personal gun ownership. There have been many laws and regulations enacted to help stop gun-related violence and death in the United States. In the 1930s during Prohibition the National Firearms Act and the Federal Firearms Act were introduced in reaction to violence by organized crime. These Acts banned machine guns, put a tax on gun sales, and regulated certain types of sales and shipment of weapons. In 1968 the Gun Control Act was put into place banning mail order gun sales after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was created in 1972 in order to issue gun licenses, inspect dealers, and enforce laws. In 1994 the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act initiated a mandatory five-day waiting period and background check on all unlicensed individuals trying to purchase a firearm (Lee).

	Gun Control is "any action taken by federal, state, or local government to regulate the sale, purchase or use of guns by individual citizens"(Lee). Some say that the heart of the gun controversy is not gun control, but gun culture (Bowman). 