In Mexico, few citizens own military-pattern firearms. But the criminals and drug cartels certainly have them.
Sorry about losing a ‘0’ in the stats quoted from the Chronwatch article above. Should still make sense.
I would not doubt that for a moment. This is partly because homicide with a gun is very rare because guns are not readily available. Those who do have guns (a very small proprotion), in particular farmers, therefore have access to more realiable means to kill themselves than the rest of us.
One of my farming family students was from a pro-gun home. At 16 he got very depressed over a girlfriend and exam issues and shot himself - fatally. His family are now very anti-guns. It was that experience which cememted my views to support the strictest gun laws possible. It was devastating. Our teenage suicide rate is particularly bad among boys in the country areas. It is one of the arguments used to make gun laws stricter.
Lynne
Certain firearms are reserved for the military. No citizen is allowed to own them legally. Basically drugs go north, money and guns come south.
Freakonomics had a careful statisical review, and concluded that guns did not have a significant effect on the violent crime rate one way or the other.
I am not really impressed when a reduction in guns means dudes stop shooting themselves and instead stand in front of trains. Using that as an example in a decrease in “gun violence” is damn fucking stupid, not to mention lying their ass off.
In short, yes. There is a steady black market of guns coming from the US that “feeds” both the civilians and criminal elements.
Out of curiosity, where do these guns come from? Stolen from warehouses, sold by some profiteering soldiers, falling out of trucks on bumpy roads?
Just seems to me like it should be relatively easy to keep track of military weaponry in this country.
Incidentally, I’m pro-gun ownership, but I think it honestly depends on circumstances and isn’t a constitutionally guarenteed right (I maintain the 2nd Amendment is saying that the right to bear arms as part of a well regulated militia is what it’s talking about). A rancher living out in the middle of BFE Texas, up in the Panhandle, probably has very practical needs for guns like rifles, shotguns, or handguns (defending himself or his livestock from wild animals like coyotes, for instance). Someone living in a manhatten apartment may not necessarily need something like a rifle, but he or she may very well find a handgun useful for self defense (but ONLY if they know how to use the thing properly!).
That said, neither the rancher nor the New Yorker probably have any reasonable use for an M-16 or a Ma-Deuce or a 150mm howitzer.
Plus, having gone shooting before, I have to say: It’s just fun. I want to own a Ruger Bearcat and maybe a Beretta 92 with the brigadier slide at some point, but I don’t have any particular intention of using either for self defense (in fact, I’d rather just live somewhere where I wouldn’t NEED guns to defend myself, assuming that i have the practical choice).
Well, there is the ol’ argument of hypothetically defending against the government.
Another pitfall to be aware of in comparing crime rates, besides whether the same crimes are being reported in the same way, is whether they are reported at all. Different police forces have different reporting requirements (and different levels of compliance with requirements). I would expect that the UK police, being much more homogenous and with far fewer competing jurisdictions and policies, have more uniform reporting requirements and are more likely to report all reportable crimes than the US police, with forces ranging from tiny town forces to the NYPD to the FBI.
You also need to consider the likelihood that the crime was reported to police in the first place. I would expect that, depending on the location and the victim, many crimes are never reported, because the victim feels it would be useless, they fear reprisal, they fear public shame (e.g. for rape and similar crimes), or they don’t want to bring police attention (e.g. are themselves engaged in crime). How much this factor affects reporting from country to country I have no idea.
True, but given that the government in any given hypothetical country you may live in has far more assault rifles, machine guns, and artillery than the typical private citizen can fit in his back yard (nevermind the fuss the neighborhood association would make 
), the name of the game would seem to be to have easily concealed weapons, or weapons with other legitimate uses (ie: a scoped rifle could be easily used against both deer and hypothetical opressive troops, but owning a howitzer or a rocket launcher could just highlight you as an early target for the far more heavily armed enemy).
Of course, if the situation is such that you’re having to defend yourself against the apparantly hostile military of your own government, the legal right of owning anything is pretty moot by then.
The rape/sexual assault complaint is valid, but otherwise the figures you cite actually seem to support the pro-gun people’s argument. From your link:
[ul][li]Assaults increased 49% between 1995 and 2001[/li][li]Robberies increased 82%[/li][li]Sexual assaults increased 28%[/li][li]Homicides fell about 4%[/ul][/li]This is actually worse than the Chronwatch figures in all four categories! Chronwatch claimed trends of, respectively, +39%, +70%, +19% (assuming their rape number was supposed to represent overall sexual assault) and -11%. Incidentally, the AIC report says that the data for 1995-1999 has been “revised.” Apparently it was revised upward.
And I believe from memory all these stats are down again since 2001, as the heroin epidemic has died down for whatever reason. I’ll see if I can find stats for that.
What I can confirm is that the ban on, and buyback of, assault weapons has been stunningly effective. The buyback removed 700,000 weapons from the community, or approximately 20% of the firearms in the country - the US equivalenmt would be something like 40 million. This was triggered by the Port Arthur massacre of 35 dead and 18 seriously wounded in 1996. In the decade leading up to that event Australia experienced 11 mass shootings (5+ victims), totalling 100 dead and 52 wounded. In the 10 years since then not one mass shooting has occurred anywhere in Australia.
In the 20 years before those new laws an average of 617 Australians died by gunshot, in the 7 years afterwards the average was 331. For the same two periods firearm homicide dropped from an average of 93 per year to 56.
Not to throw a wrench in my own team’s works, but cite?
Sure the trend has been downward, before and after the gun buyback
Just a quick point of clarification on this one… homeowners who shoot an intruder usually are arrested by the police and charged with an offence.
However, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will usually decide fairly early on not to proceed with the prosecution.
The argument from the police is that an offence has clearly been committed - and therefore arrest and charges are the only sensible way forward - but that it’s up to the CPS (not the police) to determine whether it’s in the public interest to pursue the charges in court.
And more often than not the homeowner will not face any punishment (exceptions being e.g. the Tony Martin case where excessive violence was used)
It was typed directly from a Sydney Morning Herald article (27/04/2006) written by Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health at Sydney University. He has also written a book on the Port Arthur Massacre and gun control* Over Our Dead Bodies: Port Arthur and Australia’s Fight For Gun Control. Pluto Press, 1998.*. I found a link to another version of the article here.
Quoting further from the same article:
Yeah, thats all well and good, Askance, but when we need to rise up against the government or redcoat oppressors, what then… huh…huh ??
Sorry about the use of irony, I forgot we were in GQ. :smack:
I think what you are trying to say is that gun control has occurred and Australia’s crime rate has got worse, right? Because you’d need a whole lot more than the the co-incidence of two facts (if indeed they are facts) to assume a causal relationship, wouldn’t you?
I’ll say there isn’t. Is the argument that rapists and murderers are scared into submission by gunless police but thieves are not? Or what?