Guns - Yes or No?

[DOMS]

I wish we could make all of the pro gun control people write that post on a chalk board until it is burn into their tiny little brains.

They should have to write:

I do not think things through.
I do not think things through.
I do not think things through.
I do not think things through.
I do not think things through.
I do not think things through.
I do not think things through.
I do not think...

 

[Noodles]

What you have to remember is this...............Who ever commits these types of crimes, they don't buy the guns legally. They buy them illegally-off the streets(blackmarket). That will always happen, even if you ban them. That is why it won't make sense to ban guns. You are only taking them from the ones who abide by our laws.

I know it doesn't make sense to ban guns in the US, thats what I said...

 

[DOMS]

I know it doesn't make sense to ban guns in the US, thats what I said...

But it's the way you said it...

 

[Noodles]

But it's the way you said it...

Because I didn't 100% agree with your opinion? sorry

 

[DOMS]

I was kidding. Don't the woman in the UK use that line?

"It's not what you said, it's the way you said it."

 

[Noodles]

Yeah I just didn't pick up on it... non-sarcastic sorry ;p

 

[DOMS]

Good going...

 

[maniclion]

What you have to remember is this...............Who ever commits these types of crimes, they don't buy the guns legally. They buy them illegally-off the streets(blackmarket). That will always happen, even if you ban them. That is why it won't make sense to ban guns. You are only taking them from the ones who abide by our laws.

Hey thats what I said!!! ?????

Criminals usually don't use a gun they registered under their name, they'll get one illegally, carry it until a)they bag somebody or b)they get caught with it. The crimes committed with a registered owners gun is usually a crime of passion, and taking the guns away won't stop that, then they'll resort to bb guns, pepper spray, mallets and tape oh and astronaut diapers.....

 

[KelJu]

Hey thats what I said!!! ?????

Criminals usually don't use a gun they registered under their name, they'll get one illegally, carry it until a)they bag somebody or b)they get caught with it. The crimes committed with a registered owners gun is usually a crime of passion, and taking the guns away won't stop that, then they'll resort to bb guns, pepper spray, mallets and tape oh and astronaut diapers.....

Lawl!

 

[glassmouth]

There's about 200 million guns in the US so banning them wont do shit. If I cant get a gun to kill you, then I guess I'm just gonna have to go Medieval on your ass

 

[Will Brink]

No kidding. I hope you pop into open chat more often Will. Yo usound like a smart and well educated person.

I have done a bit of research on the gun issue yes, but not as much as some. It's more a side hobbby to my nutritional/supplement/BBing research. Regardless, I fond it sad, but typical, that people who know nothing about guns, gun lwas, gun data, or history, seem to have no problems offering their opinion on the topic. I don't offer my opinion on quantum physics often. Why? 'Cause I don't knoe jack sh&* about the topic.

 

[Will Brink]

As a Canadian... I have never had the desire to have a gun. Why would you assume we would want them? I have never understood the American obsession with wanting to have a gun. It seems pretty pointless to me.

Don't get me wrong. I am not anti-gun. I just don't care either way. I don't have a use for one.

You don't have to have a use for one. One often does not have a use for one until one NEEDS it. Regardless the issue is much larger then you or I. A worthy read:




The Next International Right
Thursday, October 17, 2002
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds


The past century was one of barbarism and mass murder, one in which the world stood by while large populations were exterminated by governments bent on power and possessed of the means of killing.

After World War II, the "international community" determined that the most important goal of the new international system created for the post-war era would be the prevention of genocide. "Never again," we were told, and nations signed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in large numbers.

Among the nations who signed were Cambodia (1950), the Congo (1962) and Rwanda (1975), though Rwanda was originally covered by Belgium???s agreement in 1952, when Rwanda was a Trust Territory administered by Belgium.

These three nations, of course, went on to become the greatest sites of genocide in the second half of the 20th century. (China's mass murders and starvation under Mao are more properly called "democide," as they did not single out a particular group or culture.)

In every case, the "international community" stood aside while the genocide took place unimpeded by the parchment barriers of international agreement. Tea, sympathy and peacekeeping forces were provided after the killing was done, but no action was taken to seriously inconvenience the killers while they were at work. International agreeements, and the international community, have proved as useless as the League of Nations was in confronting Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia.

As one article on the Rwandan genocide in Foreign Affairs puts it:

As reports of genocide reached the outside world starting in late April, public outcry spurred the United Nations to reauthorize a beefed up "UNAMIR II" on May 17. During the following month, however, the U.N. was unable to obtain any substantial contributions of troops and equipment. As a result, on June 22 the Security Council authorized France to lead its own intervention, Operation Turquoise, by which time most Tutsi were already long dead.

Nor have efforts to deter genocide by trying killers after the fact done very well. As the magazine Legal Affairs reports, Rwandan killers have turned up actually on the payroll of the "International Court" designated to try war criminals. It is, said one observer, as if Klaus Barbie had turned up on the staff at Nuremberg. Pol Pot, meanwhile, apparently died in bed.

This has led some observers to suggest that genocide isn???t something that can be addressed by international conventions or tribunals. A recent article in the Washington University Law Quarterly argues that the most important thing we can do to prevent genocide is to ensure that civilian populations are armed:

The question of genocide is one of manifest importance in the closing years of a century that has been extraordinary for the quality and quantity of its bloodshed. As Elie Wiesel has rightly pointed out, "This century is the most violent in recorded history. Never have so many people participated in the killing of so many people."

Recent events in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and many other parts of the world make it clear that the book has not yet been closed on the evil of official mass murder. Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society's weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage.

Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered--one does not usually lead to the other--but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed. (Emphasis added).

The result, conclude law professor Daniel Polsby and criminologist Don Kates, is that "a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country's civilian weapons policy and its liability to commit genocide."

Armed citizens, they argue, are far less likely to be massacred than defenseless ones, and armed resistance to genocide is more likely to receive outside aid. It is probably no accident that the better-armed resistance to genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo drew international intervention, while the hapless Rwandans and Cambodians did not. When victims resist, what is merely cause for horror becomes cause for alarm, and those who are afraid of the conflict???s spread will support (as Europe did) intervention out of self-interest when they could not be bothered to intervene out of compassion.

It is no wonder that genocide is so often preceded by efforts to disarm the people.

Current events in Zimbabwe appear to be playing out in the fashion that Polsby and Kates warn against. If this is the case, then surely the human rights community could be expected to take on the subject of armed citizens, particularly as the right to arms is far closer to the individual rights that make up the "first generation" of internationally recognized human rights.

After all, the human rights community has long argued that all sorts of dramatic changes in international law are justified if they might make genocide unlikely and has been nothing less than flexible in discovering such "post-first-generation" human rights as "developmental rights," "environmental rights" and a "right to peace."

In fact, the human rights community has addressed the issue -- but from the wrong side. They seem generally supportive of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan???s effort to put in place a global gun control regime "including a prohibition of unrestricted trade and private ownership of small arms."

In other words, in the face of evidence that an armed populace prevents genocide, the human rights community has largely gotten behind a campaign to ensure that there will be no armed populaces anywhere in the world.

It seems to me that the human rights community has things exactly backward. Given that the efforts of the international community to prevent and punish genocide over the past several decades have been, to put it politely, a dismal failure, perhaps it is time to try a new approach. International human rights law is supposed to be a "living" body of law that changes with the needs of the times in order to secure important goals -- chief among which is the prevention of genocide. Given that the traditional approaches of conventions and tribunals have failed miserably, the human rights community should be prepared to endorse a new international human right: the right of law-abiding citizens to be armed.

It may seem odd to make such an argument at a time when D.C. is being terrorized by a mysterious gunman. But no one should pretend that rights do not have costs. We recognize the right to free speech not because we believe that speech does no harm, but because we believe that free speech has benefits that outweigh the harm. We recognize the right to abortion not because we believe that it is costless, but because the cost of having the state supervise women???s pregnancies is seen as worse. And we recognize the freedom of religion not because religion is safe -- it can and does lead to violence, as the worldwide epidemic of Islamic terrorism demonstrates -- but because having the government prescribe what is orthodox is worse.

Similarly, an armed populace might conceivably lead to more crime (though the criminological evidence suggests otherwise). But even if one believes that widespread ownership of firearms by law-abiding citizens leads to somewhat more crime, that is not by itself an argument against creating such a right, merely a cost to be set against the increased protection from genocide that such a right would provide.

Given the high value that we (supposedly, at least) place on preventing genocide, it seems unlikely that minor increases in crime rates could justify eliminating such a protection.

I wonder if the Bush administration???s diplomatic corps will have the nerve and the integrity to push this argument at the U.N. and elsewhere, not merely as an argument in opposition to global gun control, which they have been making already, but an argument in favor of a positive right to be armed as part of international human rights law? Perhaps they will, if enough Americans encourage them to.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and publishes InstaPundit.Com. He is co-author, with Peter W. Morgan, of The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society (The Free Press, 1997).

 

[Will Brink]

.. But you can't deny the simple fact that the violent crime/murder rates in America are MUCH higher than in the UK. The reason the gun ban works here is because it was rare for someone to own a gun before they were banned. I

What???s stunning to me is how many people from the UK know so little about their own crime rates. The UK has the highest crime rates of any European country and exceeds the US in many forms of crime. Furthermore, an attempt to ban guns has done nothing but INCREAESED you gun crime rates. Really, do some research first,

On your crime rates:

???Britain has the worst record in western Europe for killings, violence and burglary and its citizens face one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime, a study has shown.???

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...rim25.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=50048

Regarding the effects of gun control attempts in Britian:


EDMONTON JOURNAL
Britain proves gun control is wrong: Gun crime nearly doubled after law-abiding Brits surrendered their handguns
Friday 14 May 2005

p. A18
On March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, with three pistols and shot dead 16 young children and one of their teachers.

In the wake of this horrific massacre of innocents, a judicial inquiry recommended more stringent rules for handgun ownership in Britain, but cautioned against an outright ban.

Politicians being politicians, though, they sought to prove they were
acting to prevent a recurrence of such a shooting (as if anyone can
prevent lunatics from acting insanely) by passing a law forbidding
ordinary civilians from possessing handguns. Handgun owners were given
until February 1998 to hand in all their guns.

In all, about 162,000 handguns and 700 tonnes of ammunition were
surrendered to police.

Jack Straw, currently Britain's foreign secretary, but at the time the
home secretary, pronounced the hand-in a "tremendous success" and
predicted it would make England, Scotland and Wales very much safer.

Tuesday, the gun-crime statistics for the first five years of this
experiment in citizen disarmament were released. And what has been the
result? The incidence of gun crime in England and Wales has nearly
doubled from 13,874 in 1998 to 24,070 in 2003. And the incidence of
firearms murder, while thankfully still very small, has risen 65 per
cent.

Politicians being politicians, they of course have not drawn the
obvious parallel. When the statistics were released earlier this week,
no official even mentioned the total handgun ban. (Not even Britain's
Olympic sport shooters are permitted to own handguns for competition.)

It never even occurred to British politicians and reporters to make a
connection. Banning handguns was an important symbol in the wake of the
Dunblane shootings. It was the right thing to do at the time. Its
intended consequences, realized or not, well, they're secondary.

The ban was a "then" solution, the spiral in gun crime is a "now"
problem -- different matters entirely to the chattering classes.

It's not necessarily the case that the stripping of guns from ordinary,
law-abiding gun owners caused the explosion in gun crime by leaving the
population defenceless against armed criminals.

There is almost surely some cause and effect, though.

Another report released last year by Britain's Home Office revealed
that since the late 1990s, robbery has jumped dramatically, too. It rose
by 28 per cent in 2002 alone and, since 1998, there has been an increase
in the annual average of muggings of more than 100,000. England alone
has nearly 400,000 robberies each year, a rate nearly one-quarter higher
per capita than that of the United States.

It is entirely likely that some of the increase in the past five years
has stemmed from an increased confidence among criminals that ordinary
citizens almost certainly have no guns in their homes.

But it is unlikely the handgun ban accounts for all or even most of the
increase. France has had a similar upward spike in robberies over the
past five years without banning guns. France, too, now has a violent
crime rate at or above the Americans', with the exception of murder.

For some reason, no one in the industrialized world murders one another
like Americans. However, in most other categories of violent and
property crime, the rest of us are catching up.

The likely causes of Britain's crime wave (and France's and Germany's
and the Netherlands' and so on) are illegal immigration, drug wars and
extremely lenient treatment of convicted criminals. Holland is set to
deport 30,000 failed refugee claimants over the coming months in part in
hopes of reducing high levels of crime.

However, even if confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens does not
prompt new heights of violent crime, it does not follow that seizure is
a neutral act.

The best that can be said of it is that it is totally useless. As such,
it is pointless.

Yet seizure also amounts to a forfeiture of private property by persons
who have committed no crime (and thus have given the state no legitimate
reason to take their property). So its pointlessness is a deep violation
of individual liberty.

If the seizure of private guns does not prevent crime -- and from the
British example it is clear it does not -- then there is no common good
that could possibly justify seizure.

And if Britain's mandatory hand-in encouraged even a few hundred
robberies and a handful of murders by emboldening criminals, then the
hand-in was a crime by the state against law-abiding citizens.

Similarly, the registry forced on Canadian gun owners nearly a decade
ago has been totally useless. If taking guns away is not enough to
prevent gun crimes, how could collecting registrations on guns to fill
government databases do any better?

The problem is criminals with guns, period. Targeting law-abiding
owners, whether through registration or confiscation, is looking in the
wrong place for a solution to gun crime.

There have been rumours out of Ottawa for months now that the Liberals
intend to make Canada's registry less intrusive and expensive,
friendlier to "legitimate gun owners."

Even if it is made less harsh and simpler to use, so long as it
continues to focus on lawful owners instead of criminals, it will merely
be a kinder, simpler sort of useless.
_______________________
Lorne Gunter
Columnist, Edmonton Journal
Editorial Board Member, National Post
tele: (780) 916-0719
fax: (780) 481-4735
e-mail: lgunter@shaw.ca
132 Quesnell Cres NW
Edmonton AB T5R 5P2

 

[Will Brink]

I always hear how things in the UK are so much safer than here in the US. I'm wondering if that's really true ...

It's not. See my other posts.

 

[KelJu]

Excellent information Will. It took me a while, but that was a very good read. It helps prove DG's main point that disarming increases crime, not the other way around.

 

[Will Brink]

Excellent information Will. It took me a while, but that was a very good read. It helps prove DG's main point that disarming increases crime, not the other way around.

That is a fact.

 

[maniclion]

The sports riots in England get more out of control than they do here in the US, soccer hooligans are fucking completely insane...