Gun Control

Great Debates
61

Well yes, but I think you’ll find that there is an awful lot more to that than mere gun control.

Even if they’d had weapons they’d still have been hunted down and killed. I did ask earlier on how exactly a group of armed citizens could hope to fight the military might of their govt. It’s damn tricky.

Eh? What’s all that got to do with gun control? Sounds a bit more like an excuse to say ‘If it weren’t for us you’d all be speaking German’ to me. It was wartime, the population of Britain was bent towards one goal, and gun shortage wasn’t really an issue.

ok, but I haven’t put up any statistics.

I don’t know how many people in the UK are killed per year by our police. I expect it isn’t that many given that our police do not, in the main, have guns.

Sorry - I was being facetious, pesky text doesn’t really convey nuances. I am aware that the contents of a Schwarzenegger movie do not necessarily convey the full truth.
I do see your point though, I just think I have perhaps a more optimistic outlook on just how nasty my government is likely to get.

62

Sure, I agree. If a jew shot a german soldier, he would himself be shot.

He would be as dead as he ended up being anyways at the gas chamber. He is still dead, but one less german soldier in our way.

If all 6 million jews had had guns, and if each jew killed a nazi before he himself got shot, then Patton would have had 6 million less german soldiers between him and Berlin. It would have made the American victory in Europe a lot easier(and quicker) if each jew killed a nazi before he was exterminated.

The United States supports Isreal, and if we need to go there to help Isreal, then this time, you can be sure that lots of arabs are going to be killed BEFORE our boys get there, and we will have lots of armed jewish civilians fighting by our side instead of pathetically watching the action behind fences totally and meekly defenseless.

The jews in todays Isreal dont believe in gun control anymore. They learned theri lessons. They saw what it meant to be totally defenseless and unarmed and at the mercy of any government, and what it meant for only the governemnt police or military to have all the guns.

63

Yes, I agree, it is tricky, but not impossible, and it has happened in the past.

Find a good book on the American Revolution.

It will tell how the armed British citizens in the American colonies fought and defeated their own government and also the most powerful army on earth at that time. The armed citizens of the American colonies even eventually formed their own makeshift armies, with most of them still using their personal home firearms.

Other books, may be read about the Russian revolution where armed russian peasants defeated the Czars army.

Vietnam: Although Vietnam was not a revolution, it was still a country where armed civilians successfully fought against a foreign invader and eventually won by wearing it down. It still will show how armed Vietnamese civilians killed most of the 50,000 dead americans while the United States army was at its peak of world power, and eventually caused the foreign army to leave their country etc.

Another couple of good books would be “Target Switzerland” and “Total Resistance” about how Switzerland has kept foreign invaders out of their country for nearly 500 years, and how it also prevented its own government from killing Swiss citizens during that entire time.

64

I suppose the underlying issue is what group of people you are willing to put your trust in. Susanann, you seem to be ordering it on ethnic lines - I’m not sure how much I trust my govt, but I suppose in this argument I trust them enough to be happy for them to have the guns and not the general populace. In a country such as my own, where persecution isn’t really going on, I don’t see why we should have easy access to guns.

I can see a counter-argument coming - what about Weimar Germany? They were progressive, liberal, and then the populace promptly elected the Nazis. Yes, things can always get worse, but it seems almost paranoid to me to have everyone have a gun just in case.

65

Holy low-sodium no-artificial-additives diet crap on a stick, Susanann, is it too much to ask you to read a fucking history book? :mad: :mad: :mad:
We turned the Nazi invasion back at the Channel in 1940. You’ve heard of the “Battle of Britain”, I assume? After that, Hitler gave up on actually invading us as a bad job and a year or so later made the huge mistake of starting a land war against Russia. We weren’t out of the woods yet by any means - we still had to fear being starved into submission in the Battle of the Atlantic, as we weren’t self-sufficient in either food or war materials - but there was a distinct dearth of Americans over here saving our non-gun-owning butts from Hitler.

You might like to correct the misapprehension that you possibly have over which of the States and the Reich declared war on the other. It went like this: What Hitler really needed was a Far Eastern ally against the USSR. Japan would have fitted the bill nicely, but they had a non-aggression pact with the Russkis. So upon the occasion of Pearl Harbor, Hitler decided it would be a good idea to pay the Japanese a favour in the hopes that they would respond in kind. He may have been influenced in his decision, as may the Japanese in their decision to open hostilities in the first place, by America’s apparent unwillingness to wage war. Being a nation of private gun-owners didn’t, seemingly, carry over into a tendency to get their hands dirty on the international stage.

Anyway, suffice it to say that, so far from waiting for the Americans to bail out our timid, non-gun-owning arses, we got stuck in here, there and everywhere - in Norway, in France, in Greece, in North Africa, and in Burma and the Pacific in due course, as well as fighting the U-boats in the Atlantic (we captured the Enigma machine, by the way) and keeping up a bomber offensive against Germany. We also ran convoys to Murmansk to help keep the Soviets going, though our efforts there may have been more ornament than use, and as soon as it was feasible to land in Sicily and subsequently in Normandy, we pulled a big share of the action there too.

What the hell use a collection of private handguns would have been against the best-equipped and most effective fighting machine the world had ever seen is something I can’t imagine. They’d have been entirely irrelevant to the Battle of the Atlantic and very little use if the Germans ever had got ashore in England. At best they would have been useful for civilian resistance once they’d installed their puppet government - but all of the occupied countries found out what a high price the Germans exacted for that kind of behaviour.

Go into any English country village, no matter how small, and you will find there a war memorial inscribed with the names of the men of that village who laid down their lives in the two World Wars of the 20th century. Invariably the names represent a sizeable proportion of the population at the time. Our lack of private gun ownership didn’t seem to dissuade us from signing up to be given a Crown-property weapon and fight the good fight. And by sneeringly claiming that we get our attitudes on gun control from our meek willingness to let America defeat Hitler for us (you can Google the death statistics if you like), you insult the memory of all the British war dead.

You perpetuate the worst (and ordinarily ill-justified) stereotype of American ignorance when you make such a claim, and I’ll be waiting for an apology.

66

Guns? Cars? Drive-by? Har! <knee slap>

67

Right, I finally have time to answer this properly, and I actually have some statistics from the Home Office to back up my statements! It hasn’t been easy digging this stuff up. First of all, all figures used here come from the following publication:

Crime in England and Wales 2001/2002: Supplementary Volume from the UK Office of National Statistics, which can be perused at your convenience by clicking here:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb103.pdf

Now, to put things into context, in 1986 a deranged git called George Hamilton went running around Hungerford with a load of weaponry shooting people. This was followed up by the 1986 Firearms Act which essentially made firearms acquisition a bit of a bummer, introducing a huge raft of (in my opinion) unnecessary restrictions on the vast majority of responsible gun-owners, together with the odd sensible one. In 1995 this chap in Dunblane took out a couple of semi-auto pistols and went on a similar rampage in a primary school. As is pretty standard in this sort of case, he blew his head off before he could be arrested. This was followed by another firearms act which banned the private ownership of all centrefire pistols (handguns if you’re American, or if you work in the Home Office now, it would seem). Then El Caudillo Blair piped up and he finished the job off by banning .22 rimfire pistols too.

Now obviously this has all been done to protect the public from homicidal maniacs, and it seems to make sense, right? Less guns = fewer people getting shot. That’s my bit, now over to the Home Office.

I draw your attention to Table 2a on page 34 of this document, which I have just tried to paste into here but made a mess of it, so I’ll quote some figures instead.

Total number of crimes involving a firearm 1997/98 (first year of the pistol ban): 4,903
Total number of crimes involving a firearm 2001/02: 9,974

More detail now. Of these:

Violence against the person 1997/98: 1,463
Violence against the person 2001/02: 3,444

I could quote more, but they all tell the same story. Now we get into the part about the effectiveness of legislation to restrict the legal ownership of firearms, and I’m going to focus on pistols here.

58% of all crimes involving a firearm were committed using a pistol. So that’s the vast majority of all crimes being committed with a type of weapon that cannot be owned legally at all.

Now I realise that this is just a snapshot, and that we could go on and on about methodology, and increase in the level of crime reporting and so on, but I’m going to jump to some conclusions:

  1. Criminals have a tendency to not give a monkey’s about current firearms legislation. They’re just not that sort of people.

  2. Banning handguns has had no effect whatsoever on the rising levels of firearms-related crime.

  3. Over 50,000 people can no longer practice their sport for no discernible benefit to anyone.

Admittedly it is possible that one of these 50,000 guys was a nutter who would have gone off the rails and shot some kids in a school. I’m afraid that if you give people a freedom, there will always be someone who will abuse it. So it all comes down to this: is it justifiable to deprive 50,000 people of their right to pursue a harmless passtime for no demonstrable benefit (apart from the fact that undoubtebly most people in the UK believe that this approach works, but then they probably haven’t had a copy of this report posted to them)? And as terrible as it may seem, the Dunblane and Hungerford massacres were abberrant events, and not a part of the general trenc of gun-violence that we are seeing here.

Of course there’s also the fact that if the existing laws had been applied, neither of these two massacres would have occurred, and this was brought up at the subsequent enquiries, but with the public baying for blood, and the culprits having escaped human justice, our politicians didn’t have the guts to essentially say “Sorry, we fucked up, we’ll try not to do it again”.

So MrNick, I hope that answers some of your questions. I’d just like to say that I am of the opinion that it’s not up to people to demonstrate why they should be allowed to do something, it’s up to whoever wishes to prevent them to justify why they should be deprived of a freedom. And it had better be a damned good reason.

68

I guess our boys should have stayed home in ww2? since you think England almost had Hitler conquered, that Hitler “gave up” against England, and that Hitler would forevermore have left Britain alone.

I guess it is only a matter of opinion on whether or not Britain would have defeated Hitler without the United States, but I dont think you will find too many historians who would agree with you. I agree to disagree with you.

69

Excellent post Zorro I feel smarter for reading it. I have never seen the UK gun issues today. Succinct and to the informative!

Cheers!

70

Cite? :rolleyes:

71

Yeah that was a great post I made there.

“I have never seen the UK gun issues today. Succinct and to the informative!”

Should have read:

I have never seen the UK gun issues even questioned by a UK citizen on this board. The post was succinct and informative!

72

How does minty green continue to get away with the obviously intended to be derogatory ‘gun fetishists’ comments aimed at those of us on this board who own firearms and believe the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to own such?

73

Here’s a thread for ya, lissener.

74

From the other thread, to this one where it is more useful…

It is clear that many criminals within USA have access to firearms. It is NOT proven that the right to own guns is key to the availability of guns to criminals. See especially Zorro’s post above. But it would be nice to see both sides of the gun/no-guns debate actually working on ideas to reduce the ability of criminals getting hold of guns.

Would it be reasonable to dissallow anyone with any criminal conviction from ever legally owning a gun? Is this the current pollicy in USA?
Is there any statistics showing how many illegally used guns, were initially bought legally from a gun manufacturer or gun shop, as opposed to purchased through illegal channels? If there are many legal guns becoming illegaly used, how is this happening? Are they stollen from the legal owner, or resold, or illegaly used by the legal owner?

75

“Your boys”, Susanann, were not over here to do us a favour - barring a small but welcome number who came over here on their own initiative while the States were still neutral - but as a result of the fact that Hitler declared war on the USA. And the bulk of the hard work in defeating Hitler and the bulk of the blood spilt was by the USSR, lest you forget. Moreover, as to lives lost, we paid far more than you. Don’t you dare speak as though we had no interest in defending our own freedom, but relied on the Americans to fight our battles for us. Rather say that from 1939 to Pearl Harbor, you relied on the British to keep the Reich from becoming a problem you needed to worry about.

Now, since I made no claim that Britain could have defeated Hitler without the entry of the US - I’ve even said that, what with the Battle of the Atlantic and so on, we were still far from safe - your post above is merely beating a straw man. But I’ll move swiftly on from this and turn to another of your points:

Picking up on your firm grasp of the Final Solution, there’s another fundamental flaw in your assumption: that the Nazis would have allowed the hypothetical private-gun-owning Jews to trade one Jewish life for one German life for very long. They did get the odd surprise from the Jewish resistance, but in general all the odds were on their side: Go in mob-handed and armed to the teeth against a civilian populace apprehensive at what the Nazis might do if they didn’t do as they were told, and if anyone looks like putting up a fight, you not only shoot him but you conduct massive reprisals against anyone in the vicinity - and everyone knows this very well, and even such humane Gentiles as may be on hand dare do nothing. And where there were large numbers of Jews already ghettoed in together, it’s even simpler: At the first sign of trouble, pull out the infantry, bring up the heavy stuff, and raze the neighbourhood.

It’s important to understand, I think, that a lack of private gun ownership wasn’t the only thing that doomed the Jews. It was the fact that, by and large, they weren’t confronted with the spectre of their impending death until they actually rolled up on the train and saw the smoke pouring out of the chimneys at the death-camps, by which time it was generally too late to pull out the trusty handgun from the sideboard and have at the Nazis. Some even thought, on being driven into the shower blocks, that despite the horrible rumours they had heard they were only going to be given a shower. Otherwise they were confronted with situations that might turn out badly for them if they did as they were told, but assuredly would result in immediate, non-negotiable death for themselves and their friends and family if they didn’t. Again, private gun ownership wouldn’t have helped.

Fortunately the rebellious American colonists had a much more humane oppressor on their hands…

Whatever optimistic thoughts the Swiss may have entertained, the fact of the matter is that they were never put to the test. At the very best, the jury is out, and likely to remain out, on whether it would have worked out the way they wanted it. Otherwise, the ability of an armed populace to resist the Nazi menace is somewhere between “not proven” and “don’t talk hogwash”.

76

  1. Criminals will always have guns, the question is, do we want lawful decent citizens to be able to defend themselves against armed criminals?

  2. Yeah, we thought of that before. How do we get criminals to not use guns. Passing laws against criminals dont do much good, since criminals dont mind breaking laws, surpise, surprise!

  3. The current policy in America, is to not let criminals ever again own any guns, this has been law for at least the past 25 years. We even have a law that prevents anyone who ever committed a domestic violence crime, even a simple misdemeanor, from ever owning a gun, or even a single bullet, regardless of when that person committed a domestic violence crime, even 50 years ago, 40 years before we passed that law. For the most part, no criminal can legally get a gun, there are some very few exceptions, but not many. Generally, ex-felons cannot own guns, nor vote.

The unfortuate thing, which most people never seem to realize, is that criminals dont obey gun laws. Hmmmmm, I wonder why not?

  1. Nearly all guns, initially, were legally purchased(had to be). No American gun manufacturer or importer could stay in business if it sold guns illegally, the ATF keeps pretty good tabs on American gun manufacturers. The only guns that were initially sold illegally, were the few guns illegally imported, not much of a problem in the US today, but if guns were ever outlawed, then nearly all the guns would be sold illegally initially.

  2. Some guns are bought before people decide they want to become criminals. Other guns are stolen. It is already against the law for people to steal guns, but criminals and thieves dont seem to pay any attention to that law, surprise, surprise. There are hundreds of millions of guns in this country, there is no way of telling exactly how many we have, nor where they are, nor any way to get them all. We cant even stop illegal drugs from coming into this country. We cant even keep illegal drugs out of our prisons!

  3. The one thing that would make a HUGE!!! difference in crime rates and in lowering the violence in America, the ONLY thing that would work: would be to put violent criminals into prison, for very long terms, which would prevent convicted criminals from committing more crimes, and it would keep them from getting guns, but most Americans today are against that idea. I dont know why, but most Americans dont seem to want to put violent criminals in jail, and keep them isolated from innocent law abiding citizens. Go figure!!

In America, even convicted murderers only spend an average time in prison of just 96 months(despite a few highly publicized cases like the Manson family), and then they are released onto our streets to murder again.

Those convicted of manslaughter are out of prison an average of 49 months, then released to kill again.

Rapists are out of prison in 73 months, robbers get out after 48 mohths, assault 33 months. (Bureau of Justice Statistics Trends in State Parole 1990-2000, USA Today, October 24, 2001, page 1)

It doenst really do much good for our police to catch criminals, go to trial, get convictions, put them in prison, etc. if we are going to let most of them out within 3-8 years anyways.

So the situation is, the police, courts, prison systems, and parole systems are purposely letting convicted violent criminals out onto our streets, where those criminals willingly break our gun laws, and commit more crimes. As long as our police and court system puts violent criminals on our streets, the only safe thing for a citizen to do is to arm yourself, so that at least you can defend yourself when you do inevitably happen to meet up with those violent criminals.

77

Why do I feel so passionate about this subject? Hard to put into words. However, let me say this:
In MY America, people are FREE. That includes the right to own firearms. I don’t give a DAMN what someone outside this country thinks about it (or anyone else, for that matter).
If you aren’t comfortable owning a firearm, then DON’T. But please, stop whining. I am NOT giving up my guns. Are we clear?

78

Yes, we’re clear, mod29 - and I live in the fine state of Texas, where it’s a God-given right to ride with your shotgun (hell, until a few years ago, you could drink a beer or three on the way to your destination.)

However, it’s difficult to think that the murder rate in the U.S.A. is unrelated to our ability to bear arms. I am torn on this subject, I must admit - I am the mother of small children, and it just rips me up to hear about the accidental deaths of kids who happened upon their parent’s gun.

79

It’s interesting that even overwhelmingly liberal boards these days don’t care much for gun control anymore. It’s such a loser issue now, nobody wants to touch it.

However, that doesn’t mean if one of the 9 dwarves gets in, that we’re safe. Even Bush might want to renew the AWB disaster.

80

Thank you very much. In the UK, gun control is part of a special set of populist issues that any government can always turn to if it needs to curry some favour with the voters.

2003:
_ Prime Minister, everyone really, really cheesed off about Iraq.
_ No problem, we’ll have another high-profile crack at the foxhunters. That’ll fox the voters!
_ Nice one, Tony.

1992:
_ Prime Minister, everyone is really quite pissed off because this government is corrupt as buggery.
_ No worries, we’ll ban Rottweilers because that girl got killed by one last week.
_ But there are bugger-all Rottweilers in the UK, and frankly, Labradors kill more kids.
_ Have you seen any stories about Labradors killing kids in the papers recently?
_ Admittedly, no. Good point, John!

1996:
_ Prime Minister, looks like the voters are going to turf us out in a few months time because frankly, we’re shit.
_ OK, let’s have a last-ditch attempt at looking caring: we’ll ban pistols!
_ But that will deprive 50,000 people of their passtime and benefit nobody in any tangible way.
_ I know, but 50,000 people is a tiny minority and nobody likes them anyway. It’s a surefire win.
_ Good point. Well spotted John!

1997
_ Well Tony, we made it. Shall we give the voters a token of our gratitude?
_ Oh, all right. What can we do that costs us nothing and will keep the Masses happy?
_ Nobody’s banned .22 pistols yet.
_ I like it: it’s non-controversial, it’s a crowd-pleaser, it only annoys people that don’t vote for us anyway. We’ll do that.

Guns have rather dropped off the political radar at the moment, but I expect we’ll be having some legislation resticting airguns (seriously) soon enough, probably in the run up to the next general election. Oh, and they’re also starting to resort to really nasty right-wing populist issues like immigration. For some reason, they now refer to all immigrants as “asylum seekers”, and discreetly play the “those scrounging foreign bastards who come here and sponge off our benefits system, and then join Al-Qaeda in the Finsbury Park mosque”. Well they might do so a little less if you didn’t bomb their countries…