Confronting the Crime Pandemic - Essay Example

To confront the crime pandemic, law enforcement officers must be armed.  If not, they would not stand a chance against armed criminals.  At the same time, however, Adams and Jennison report that the use of firearms by police officers jeopardizes the lives of citizens places police officers at the risk of being shot with their own weapons, and importantly,  of unnecessarily inflicting grievous, possibly fatal, bodily harm upon suspects (Adams and Jennison, 447).  Accordingly, while police officers need to carry firearms, their crime-fighting arsenal should be supplemented by less than lethal weapons such as tasers.  While tasers have their shortcomings and cannot act as a replacement for traditional firearms, with the proper training they can significantly contribute to law enforcement’s ability to fight crime without unnecessarily inflicting grievous bodily harm or putting innocent bystanders in harm’s way.

Guns are a source of the majority of the nation’s violent crimes.   As Hemenway and Weil explain, “guns in the United States currently exact a terrible toll: over 1,500 accidental deaths per year, close to 12,000 homicides and more than 17,000 suicides” (94).  In other words, apart from the deliberate use of guns in the commission of crimes, guns are responsible for several thousands of preventable deaths per year.  Despite this, however, the very notion of banning firearms is unrealistic.  The American public believes that it has an inalienable right to bear arms for the purposes of self-defense.  Given Constitutional provisions supporting this right, it is unrealistic to assume that any gun ban proposal will ever successfully pass into federal legislature or ever be implemented (Hemenway and Weil, 94-96).  Therefore, irrespective of the role which the proliferation of guns in society plays in the country’s ever-increasing crime rights, solutions to the problem cannot assume the form of gun bans.  In other words, the most straightforward solution to the problem is simply inapplicable.