Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo
Sadly Ducimus, neither foreigners nor the anti-second amendment crowd seem swayed by cold, hard facts. Let's look at our friends across the pond in Great Britain.
England basically "banned" the ownership of handguns in 1997. They made it excessively difficult to own one legally.
In 2001 - the BBC reported that in the following 2 years (all the data that was had at the time), the use of handguns during crimes INCREASED by 40%.
The largest increases - were in the areas where there were less legally owned guns. Those areas with the (still) highest legal gun ownership showed much less increase. In other words - criminals committed a lot more crimes where they knew that the victim was more likely to me unarmed...
Documented, cold, hard facts that gun control does not stop gun crime....
But that doesn't stop the anti-gun lobby.
Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...-Dunblane.html
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1440764.stm |
Well do bear in mind that unlike the States, the hand-gun isn't a national symbol, or deeply imbedded in our culture, so naturally there's not much of an emphasis on repealing a ban. Shotguns would probably cause an uproar because of their use in the countryside area and on grouse shooting and such, so they'll never be banned. But a hand-gun has no real history or meaning for us, so after a primary school full of young kids got shot up there was little objection to banning them, and although it's done sod all to gun crime figures, we have so far not had another Dunblane. Whether that's to do with better mental health care than the US or the handgun ban, I couldn't say, but you're probably more likely to be stabbed than shot here. Guns for show, knives for a pro as the saying goes.
But there's a big old thing in the US, at least from this perspective there is, about the gun, I mean you could say that the nation was pretty much founded on the gun, so it has a much bigger meaning than it does in the UK or much of Western Europe, or indeed much of the world for that matter.
It's a part of American social history, perhaps not so much on the coastal regions, but certainly in the central and central south.
So, yeah, it does confuse us Europeans a bit when this intense fear and terror of your own government radiates across the Atlantic, we might not trust our governments but we've found them so incompetent that there's little to fear from them, particularly when our armed forces have one tank per Corps, so there's not so much of that panic and fear, except perhaps in Germany. So, that confuses us, well, it confuses me anyway, and I find it a little sad that so many people seem to live their lives in fear of something that they have very little control over.
