Originally Posted by glee I’m not sure whether you think this is a good thing.
There are far less shootings in countries with gun control (Canada, West Europe, Australia etc.)
There are far more shootings in Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria (which don’t have gun control.)
My reply: “Mexico has very strict gun control.”
So, it is NOT true that nations with strict gun control always have less murders.
El Salvador has the highest murder rate and strict gun control. Venezuela has the 3rd highest and VERY strict gun laws.
Serbia & the Czech Republic have the loosest gun laws in Europe, and a very low homicide rate. Austria is known for permissive gun controls, but have a VEY low murder rate.
Switzerland has many guns in the hands of the ordinary swiss guy, for odd reasons, but also a very low homicide rate.
So, you just cant trot out a short list of a few nations with strict gun control (which is much more common than not) and low homicide rates and say “look, Gun control works!” Because overall most nations have stricter gun controls that the USA but oddly the USA is smack dab in the middle as far as homicide rate. Which more or less says that gun control laws dont have any significant effect on homicide rates. Because about 90 nations with stricter gun control laws have a higher homicide rate and 120 nations with stricter gun control have a lower homicide rate. Not a huge difference.
It’s my impression that Switzerland requires you to own a semi-automatic or possibly automatic rifle, but it must be stored at the military armory. You can’t just keep it at your house. Maybe you can keep some kind of bolt-action rifle or basic shotgun, but the average people there don’t actually have access to the kind of firepower that Americans do. I mean, they have access to it in the context of their service in a militia, but they can’t keep the rifles at home. Or maybe it’s ammo that they can’t keep at home. Either way, there’s some “catch” to it.
Well, I’ll be damned. I’ve seen the following thrust-and-parry in numerous gun debates over the years:
Person A: “Guns are bad!”
Person B: “Nah! In Switzerland, everyone has guns, and there’s no crime.”
Person A: “Yeah, they have guns, but they are required to keep them locked in an armory, they don’t keep them at home.”
Person B: [chirping crickets]
I have this theory that, basically, all the best engineering, all the best design, comes from either Germany, Italy, or Switzerland, whether it’s cars, watches, cameras, other types of machines, etc…it’s because of the Alps. My reasoning is that living in the mountains forces people to come up with clever solutions to problems that the people of other terrain don’t have to deal with. The mountains are a hostile environment. Coping with them requires inventing unique devices and mechanical contrivances. And in doing so, they not only cope, but thrive, in that environment.
I don’t really know what that has to do with anything, actually. It’s just a tangent.
But they dont always keep them locked in a armory, and they get to keep them after they finish serving. Switzerland has 2 Million guns in private ownership. Many of them military rifles. That’s one gun for every 4 Swiss…not counting the ones they have to have for being part of the militia.
Switzerland gets a lot of mentions in these debates but it really is the “exception that proves the rule”.
It’s a wealthy country (and homicide rate is normally inversely correlated to GDP, apart from the US). It has both licensing and registration through a permit system, and if you get a military rifle that goes along with military training, which includes how to safely store the weapon.
So yeah, I guess it shows it’s *possible *to have a country awash with guns but a low gun violence rate (excluding suicides), but it seems what it would take is the kind of reforms gun control advocates are lobbying for, and maybe a better distribution of wealth.
The Swiss system could probably work in some states but not others. It could probably also work in most of Canada.
I’ve come to the point where I think the only way to actually get tighter gun controls passed - by which I mean, something like a tiered system where you could obtain licenses (not registrations) to operate certain classes of firearms, by advancing through a system of qualifications - reasonable ones, nothing unnecessarily rigorous or burdensome - and a waiver could be obtained for people in immediate danger requiring a gun for self defense - would be to somehow spin it as something that gun owners should WANT because it actually places them in a position of privilege over everyone who has not attained said qualifications. I know that a lot of them will say quite vehemently, “it is a right, NOT a privilege”, but the bottom line is, if you’ve observed human beings as much as I have, people would RATHER HAVE a “privilege” than a “right.”
Rights are for shmucks who didn’t do anything to deserve them. Privileges are for an elite group of individuals with demonstrable usefulness to society.
Make the guys who like AR-15s and high-capacity automatic pistols and the like, WANT to be part of an elite class, not just average shmucks. Make them WANT to set themselves to a higher standard so they can feel superior.
It would take very suave marketing and persuasive propaganda to get to this point. I’m talking Don Draper shit. In other words, nothing that anyone in the Democratic Party is currently capable of.
Right, which was your attempt at distraction. As was then pointed out they get their guns from the US.
And they do not have the resources to enforce their laws, assuming that the local police isn’t too corrupt to just ignore them entirely, is that the problem here?
Maybe we can experiment with being a war zone, and see if that has any effect.
Ah, but here you go. It’s not that odd a reason at all. They actually have very strict gun control laws. It’s just that people are willing to follow them. I’ve suggested the swiss model before, but people complained that it violated 2A.
Right, if you try to cherry pick statistics to find the ones that you want, you are going to find exceptions to any rule, as you have done here.
It’s like “proving” that smoking isn’t bad for you by pointing to a 100 year old smoker. Gun control laws are not something that you can put on a sliding scale. Switzerland is thought, by some, to have loose gun control laws due to the fact of high gun ownership, while the truth is that their laws are very strict, it’s just that the people, for some odd reason, have little difficulty in following them and still being able to procure the guns that they have need for.
Wealth distribution would help. Poverty is a large part of what turns people to crime. But, the gun control measures that the swiss have make a big difference as well. Gun rights advocates like to point at switzerland as proof that there can be a high number of guns per capita with low gun violence, but then shut right up when they realize that that is because they have fairly strict gun controls that they wouldn’t want to have to abide by.
Hardly, it was his attempt at distraction by showing that other nations have gun control and low murder rates. Which is true, but if you cherry pick nations you can also find nations with strict gun control and high murder rates, and nations with loose gun control and low murder rates. Cherry picking examples is worthless and a attempt at a distraction.
One thing that we can do is to “cherry pick” nations with reasonable gun control and low murder rates, and see what they are doing that gives them those stats, and see if there is anything to be learned.
It’s like if you are doing poorly on a project at work, and someone says, “Hey, John over there is doing really well, why don’t you see if you can maybe learn something from him.”, and you rejecting that by pointing out that Geoffrey over yonder is doing worse than you. Then when it is explained that the reason that Geoffrey is doing worse than you is because you keep dumping all the trash from your project into his lap to clean up, you call that an excuse and a reason that you cannot improve your own performance.
Yes, hardening schools will help with preventing school shootings. I could also build my house out of asbestos to help prevent against a house fire. Instead, I think I’ll just take common sense measures, like not fucking around with flame throwers in the living room.
Sure *you *can avoid using flamethrowers in *your *living room, but if you live in a nation where there are 300,000,000 flame throwers in OTHER people’s hands and your neighbors own some, you’d still want to fireproof your house.
:dubious: