They last a lot longer than 20 years. I have a Winchester Model 1892 that’s 111 years old and it shoots just fine. I have two S&W Second Model Hand Ejectors, a Colt Government Model 1911, a Webley Mk.VI, and a Mauser C96 ‘Broomhandle’ all made c.1917 that are fully functional.
JFK was shot with a Carcano M91/38.
For those interested in the stats of “DGUs” there’s an couple of interesting articles in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Managment on this topic a few years back. The issue largely revolves around the difficulty of self reporting on such a complicated topic: how many people don’t want to say they used a gun defensively, how many people say they did but they didn’t need to (or did so in away that was not defensive but actually offensive), etc., etc. This problem is brought home by the number of people that reported multiple defensive uses. I mean if you’re using a gun defensively (not work related) many times a year you need to move (or stop pulling out the gun and announcing you have one everytime you hear an odd noise in the house).
So, “twenty years” is infinite, now? I must have missed that math class.
As for “They’ll just obtain guns illegally”, how? The most obvious means of obtaining a gun illegally is to steal one, but from whom? Either you’re stealing it from a law-abiding citizen, who in this hypothetical wouldn’t have had it in the first place, or you’re stealing it from another criminal, and then you just raise the question of where that guy got it.
You could, of course, manufacture your own guns, or smuggle them in from other places where they’re easier to get, but those are both a lot more difficult than the avenues currently available for criminals to get guns.
There are a LOT of guns in this country, and no record of most of them. I’ve got half a dozen of them in my closet which there isn’t any record of, nor is there a requirement to be. The obvious means of obtaining a gun illegally is to just buy it from an individual.
And guns do not have a finite lifespan…not for any practical puprose. Lots of people have guns over a 100 years old that are still quite functional, and technology has improved a great deal since those were made. I have two rifles, a shotgun and a pistol made during the first world war, a shotgun and a pistol made in the 60’s, and they are quite functional. A well maintained gun will last practically forever especially if it isn’t shot on a regular basis.
Or you could make one. 
As a matter of law, every single firearm that in Japan is registered. Possession of an unregistered firearm is illegal. There are restrictions on knives with a blade over 15 cm (approx. 6 inches) long also.
That doesn’t stop criminals from having and using guns, including using them to shoot politicians. And even having what may be the most stringent gun control laws among democratic nations doesn’t stop occasional shooting sprees, although this guy at least had passed Japan’s rigorous licensing requirements, so he legally owned the weapon he used. Of course, it’s not uncommon for Japanese to blame foreigners for the violence, at least at first. Couldn’t possibly be “peaceful Japanese” who shoot people :rolleyes:
(I was watching as the news of this one broke and it was amusing in a Kafkaesque way to see how many people and news agencies reported speculation on the man’s race when he was covered from head to toe in clothing that made him effectively anonymous. He was even wearing gloves and a helmet with the visor down.)
Taking guns away from people doesn’t stop them from flipping out and going on rampages. There have been several stabbing incidents in the last couple of years — three just in the last year — the most recent of which was in Akihabara on a Sunday, when the streets are blocked to vehicular traffic and the crowds are especially thick. That article also has links to a couple of other recent stabbings, and one prominent attack at a school in 2001 (more information here at Wikipedia). A couple of years ago, a woman was going around randomly slashing people with a kitchen knife, escaping by bike after attacking her victim. Over the course of two or three weeks she attacked several people. To my knowledge, they never caught her, and apparently she stopped attacking people, for now anyway.
While there was never a Columbine shooting, there have been a few gruesome incidents of school violence perpetrated by students, like the “Kobe Killer” who chopped an eleven year old boy’s head off, shoved a note in the mouth, and left his trophy at the gate of a school. He had earlier beaten a ten year old girl to death. He was fourteen at the time of the murder/beheading that led to his arrest. There was also an 11 year old school girl who killed an older girl with a box cutter in 2004.
These are just a few of the bigger incidents that make national news. Taking away guns might reduce the death toll a bit, but it doesn’t stop mass killings, as the rash of recent and past stabbings shows. Even very strict gun control doesn’t keep guns out of criminal hands, and even the most rigorous screening doesn’t keep everyone who legally owns a gun from misusing it. Something to think about is that Japan has a much lower rate of violent crime overall than the US, yet crimes like this still happen. Even if you were able to magically take away all firearms from every household in the US, you’d still have people going on rampages, you’d still have gang violence, you’d still have murders. All that would change is, in some cases, the weapon used.
Thanks Sleel, for an insightful post about obtaining guns in a country where guns are banned, and a variety of other topics.
Chronos and others - think about how easy it should be to control guns in a small island nation like Japan in comparison to a large nation like the United States, with a different ocean on the west and the east, and a different country bordering by land on the north and the south. How easy would it be for smugglers to get weapons into this country and distribute them to the people willing to pay?
For those of you who think that simply making a law against it will make it difficult or impossible to get, remember that there’s an uncountably large number of people getting their hands on a variety of illegal substances every day in the U.S.
There’s people who do things against the law all the time - just because there’s a law against something doesn’t mean people don’t do it. Do you ever see people speed on the freeway? Why do they do it if it’s against the law? Because they can get away with it.
People get their hands on guns illegally every day, many of which are imported to the United States, just like the illegal absinthe (not the nerfed version that was just legalized), illegal drugs, illegal drug paraphanelia, illegal cars (that’s got to be tougher to smuggle than a gun), illegal pets, illegally copied music and software, literature, etc. Not to mention illegal plants people grow in the U.S. But we should just close our eyes and pretend people don’t get those things, because it’s illegal.
Now let’s hear from someone in Singapore and see what life is like there?
Out of curiousity, why do you suppose that is? It seems to me that guns being legal might have a lot to do with it.
Could we have some numbers, please? How common are incidents of gun violence in Japan, compared to the US? Are we talking one shooting per day, or one per decade?
Chronos, that’s a game that’s been played in any number of gun control threads. You’re not going to make any real points by trying to point to a bare set of numbers and say that’s the whole story. That’s being way too simplistic and reductionistic. Besides which, the number of incidents is not the issue. If you read carefully you would notice that I absolutely do not dispute that Japan has a lower violent crime rate than the US. In fact, I said, “Something to think about is that Japan has a much lower rate of violent crime overall than the US, yet crimes like this still happen.”
There have been thick books written about the cultural differences between Japan and the US, and those differences almost all play a part in the different crime rates. With those caveats, just so you can’t say that I’m avoiding the question, Japan’s violent crime rates are about 1/6th that of the US, according to official numbers. On the other hand, Japanese are much more likely to turn violence inward than outward anyway, as you can see by the suicide rates.
It is almost impossible to directly compare two countries, especially with regard to violent crime. You run into differences in culture and behavior that confound comparison. For one example, the amount of government and police power that Japanese will accept would be unacceptably intrusive for any American. The gun laws that are already in place (which will become even more strict due to the shooting last year) require — among other rather difficult and expensive bureaucratic procedures — that the police have:
[list=]
[li]a map of the person’s house with the gun safe’s location marked[/li][li]a key to the house and the gun safe[/li][li]explicit permission to enter the house at any time, without notification, to confirm the location and condition of the firearms[/li][li]a list of all firearms owned by the household[/li][li]and the police must be notified if any conditions change.[/li][/list]
That’s basically waiving 4th Amendment rights. Can you think of anyone in the US, even the most rabid gun-haters, who would be willing to give police that much access to their house, for any reason?
Or how about weakening habeas corpus rights? The police in Japan can take you into custody on nothing much more than suspicion of a crime and can hold you and interrogate you for days without actually charging you with anything. A formal arrest requires notification of a prosecutor within 48 hours, and he must file for formal detention with the courts within 24 hours of that, but for two days they don’t even need to tell anyone that they have you. The courts rubber-stamp virtually every request for extended custody (the initial investigative detention period is up to 10 days) without a requirement to actually charge you with a crime.
You could be held for up to 23 days without any charges actually being filed. The jail and prison system are essentially separate entities, and even with recent reforms there is nowhere near enough independent oversight to prevent abuses. In the past it wasn’t particularly rare for police to use psychological and physical means to extract confessions: sleep deprivation; forced assumption of stress positions; extended interrogations, sometimes lasting days with teams of questioners; beatings; starvation. Oh, and you don’t have any right to legal counsel during questioning. Access to a lawyer is at the sole discretion of the police.
My point in my first post was just that severe restrictions on guns does not equal no gun crime, and it certainly doesn’t mean no violence at all. Even with the inherent cultural tendencies and conditioning toward group control, the almost complete disarmament of the populace, and vast police and judicial powers, the Japanese still have violent crime, even sensational violent crime, albeit at lower rates than the US. There’s no way that Americans would ever allow such conditions as abrogation of what are considered basic and fundamental rights in order to achieve a comparably low crime rate, even if such a thing were actually possible with the different cultural and ethnic makeup of the US.
Sure. But you can’t un-ring that bell.
You’re kidding, right? I’ve met plenty of anti-gun folks in my life who honestly advocated a revocation of all rights for anyone “so crazy” that they owned a gun.
Hellfire, just look in GD at what some of the long-term unbanned trolls have said over the years - owning a gun is sniveling cowardice, penis envy (oh, the irony, a woman who wants a gun as a way to help protect from a rapist has penis envy), fetishism, and even akin to domestic terrorism.
For every reasonable pro-gun advocate, I can show you a reasonable gun ban advocate. And for every gun nut, I can show you a gun ban nut.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the gun crime in Singapore.
Apparently, the only way a civilian can own a gun is to get an Arms and Explosives License (cite), and apparently the crime rate is very low. It’s their famous methods of enforcing the laws that make it so effective.
But as Sleel stated, who (of people who grew up in the US) would be willing to give up a variety of rights and accept the types of punishment they are subject to there?
Singapore has 4.5 million people, Los Angeles County alone has 9.5 million. How could you change the laws for all of the United States (300 million people) from the way they are now to the way it is in Singapore, including removing the existing guns? It would change too many fundamental rules of freedom that the United States is based on.
Well you know… as some comedian once said:
You don’t need to take the guns away. You just gotta stop making bullets.
Could it be that Slug Signorino doesn’t think much of gun ownership?