Man Shoots, Kills Seven Year-Old Girl in San Andreas Row

Crime, burglary, theft, violence has gone down, wow, why don't they mention homicides?



Well, isn't that nice, giving criminals the upper hand by selling guns on the black market, and the citizens can't protect themselves!


By George, I think he's got it!


Right, gun control was used in order to disarm Hitler when he was the Chancellor of Germany, I don't think that makes sense, could you explain?



True, true, leave Hitler aside, look at all the other instances in which gun control was used to give the government more control over their citizens.



But criminals already have guns, and even when supplies "run out" there are other resources that criminals can go to.



Not in the case of Washington D.C.
http://www.justfacts.com/gun_control.htm


Yes we both have, and that is great, even though we have opposing views it 's always good to learn.



This is more of a neutral background article about gun control, it represents cultural differences between the U.S. and Europe, very good read:

http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2002fall/article3.html

The way UK crime statistics are recorded and reported, violence against the person includes homicides. However, if gun crime had leapt up as other sources have claimed then the overall violence figure would also have risen, or at least stayed level. It didn't, it dropped quite a bit.


See my comments about availability. I still think that if something potentially harmful is easily available, more harm will be caused by it, either by accident or design.

By turning the supply of weapons into a crime you have to have limited the overall supply. Limited supply drives up price, even more so when the supply is criminalised.

The small-time crooks robbing convenience stores won't be able to get hold of ammunition for their guns in just the same way that the owners of those stores won't. There is a balance there.

Events like the shooting that the original news story reported wouldn't happen if the general populace was prevented from owning guns.


Gun control was imposed before he was Chancellor in order to disarm the National Socialist Party that he led at the time. This party became the Nazi party and ultimately put Hitler in power.

The point is that Mrs. Hitler's little boy didn't put the gun controls in place to disarm the Jews and make their capture and slaughter easier. The controls were in place before he came to power and were intended to disarm him and his cohorts.


Oops, too late.


When you have a dictatorial government all public freedoms are repressed, especially any that allow the public to defend themselves.

You aren't complaining about those government's banning of gathering in large numbers or impositions of curfews, both of which prevent organised opposition. Not every revolution requires armed resistance by the general populace, but they all require organised groups of like-minded people.


Percentages can hide many real facts. Did the homicide rate go up from one death to three in those years? That would be an increase of 200%.

You have to remember the source. If you are reading a site or paper that is for gun control or against it, be wary of figures and statistics that prove the point of the piece.


I'm glad you have taken this approach to the subject. It's always informative to hear other peoples' views on this sort of thing.


While I agree the book reviewed here may be a neutral examination of the underlying situations in the US and the UK, the review does appear to take every effort to use that analysis as proof of the rightness of allowing gun ownership.

I don't know how it reads to you, but to me it is very critical of the European trusting attitude towards their governments versus the American distrust of anybody in power.

That difference is, I believe, the root of the difference in opinion over gun control between the US and the UK. The US was formed by people who believed they had no representation in their previous government and decided to take things into their own hands. They then had to take up arms against the armies of that government to defend their independence. This recent history has to have an effect on the mindset of the country.

Meanwhile the last time their was a significant change of power in the UK was in 1660 when the short-lived commonwealth under Richard Cromwell (Oliver's son) was returned to a Monarchy. The commonwealth only lasted 11 years. Before that I believe 1066 was the previous revolution in power when the French invaded. Other than that the countries that became the UK have been reasonably quiet.

The point is that the UK has a long history of not revolting, only 11 years in the last 939. The US only has a short history of 229 years of self-governance from a history of 385 years since the Mayflower landed.

It is perhaps inevitable that the US has a distrust of government and authority and a self-reliant attitude that leads to a wish to defend themselves on a personal level. In the UK, we have been pretty stable for almost a millennium, most internal wars in that time have decided which branch of the same family have taken power and hardly any of them have changed the way the country is run, certainly not by a popular overthrowing of the ruling classes such as France, Russia and the US have seen.

Due to these differences in the attitude of the common man in the two countries, it is probably not a simple thing to compare the effects of laws on the crime rates of the two populations. It is perhaps the similar language we speak that allows the debate to go on as it does.

In recent times, the UK has started to follow the US in trends such as crime, culture and language so I'm sure the gap will narrow in time, but for now we are different people that speak a similar language.

I wouldn't conditions or laws in the UK to work as well in South Africa or Australia. There is no reason the expect that the same attitudes exist in the US either.

I don't quite know where I was going with all of that, but it seems apparent that the debate over gun control will continue with both sides pointing to events and rulings in other countries to make their point however flawed the comparisons are.

What does the old quote say "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." :)


That is quite true.



But somehow I feel it is just an export of American "pop" culture than an export of American values.


It would be interesting to note if the average citizen of any of those countries even cared about whether or not they adopted the laws of a different country.


Our debate just raged over whether government should limit gun control, but what I was implicitly assuming was that there was an "armed populace," now, there isn't as much of an armed populace in the UK as there is in some parts of the US, which has lead to different conclusions.

My main point is that people should be careful what the government should do, for every inch allowed, it has the potential to take a mile (or in metric terms, for every 2.54cm given, 1.61km can be taken.) Whenever one tries to engineer specific behavior by controlling the "invisible hand," unintended consequences can and most likely will occur.

While it may drop, in the long run, the UK will be worse off, it's because liberties have been eroded. The reason why is because the U.K. really isn't an armed populace.



Where there is a will, there's a way, the owners of the store are most likely not going to go to the blackmarket, while the criminal *does not care* we're s/he gets his ammunition.


And thousands of car accidents wouldn't occur if we just banned cars.



Gun control was used to prevent HItler and his cohorts, then that just furthers by argument that gun control generally doesn't work.



But I like resurrecting Hitler, why can't I be like raging anti-Bush people and continually make comparisons between Bush and Hitler and then be admired for my supreme intelligence?



Organized groups of like-minded people doing what? When push comes to shove, I'd rather have a way to defend myself, then only one side (the government) having all the arms.



(1992 rate 75.4 per 100,000 for D.C., 9.3 nationally.)
http://www.duke.edu/~gnsmith/articles/myths.htm


Of course but being one shouldn't just be wary, but cautious, and besides, we can apply the same advice to anyone trying to prove anything.


I'm glad that you weren't infuriated by my (admittedly) acidic sarcasm.





What does the old quote say? "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." :)


That is quite true.



But somehow I feel it is just an export of American "pop" culture than an export of American values.


It would be interesting to note if the average citizen of any of those countries even cared about whether or not they adopted the laws of a different country.


Our debate just raged over whether government should limit gun control, but what I was implicitly assuming was that there was an "armed populace," now, there isn't as much of an armed populace in the UK as there is in some parts of the US, which has lead to different conclusions.

My main point is that people should be careful what the government should do, for every inch allowed, it has the potential to take a mile (or in metric terms, for every 2.54cm given, 1.61km can be taken.) Whenever one tries to engineer specific behavior by controlling the "invisible hand," unintended consequences can and most likely will occur.

I can only vaguely remember when guns were outlawed in the UK. Now I don't think most people consider owning a gun to be a liberty and thus no-one in the UK considers the government has "taken away" ownership of guns. If you need a gun for your job or a specific reason you can obtain access to one, otherwise you can't own one.

The main point is that generally I don't think people in the UK have any motivation to own guns; because I don't think most people think they need one to defend themselves. Just a difference between UK and US culture, maybe.

If the US thinks everyone has a right to defend themselves with weapons, why won't they let every country in the world have nuclear missiles?

EDIT (just some personal notes ;) ):
I also just have to add that in the BBC news article referenced, the research was "commissioned by the Countryside Alliance's Campaign for Shooting".

The "Countryside Alliance" like to pretent they represent the view of those in the countryside, when really they only represent a fraction of those in the countryside.

I would like to point out that there are a lot of people in the countryside who do not support hunting, guns, bird shooting etc etc.

Some countries include terrorist organizations and are hellbent on their destruction. I don't want criminals to have guns (obviously), but I don't want to go about implementing it in the wrong way (i.e. disarming law-abiding citizens.)

I don't really want to get involved in this particular ressurected donnybrook...again, but I will correct one point which has been mentioned.

The British and American attituides toward private gun ownership are indeed quite divergent. However, the genesis of this divergence lies not in the stability of the British Commonwealth as has been implied, rather it lies in the tradition of autocratic control over personal weaponry. The specious modern (at the time it was written it was quite relavant) argument of popular rebellion used to justify gun ownership fails when both sides try to use it. Another related factor is the hunting cultures involved...in Britain, hunting was a privelege, jealously guarded by up to capital punishment for commoners who dared tread upon what was the province of their betters. The only commoners who needed guns were those employed to shoot the poachers. Then there were those two times when world history turned partly upon the United States' ability to churn out massive amounts of small arms and other violent paraphenalia...

So Britain's circumstances at present vis-a-vis gun violence have their genesis in the unintended consequences of feudalism and oppression, not by virtue of the stability such measures were intended to enforce. That isn't to say that the common-born residents of Albion have taken all this lying down, if memory serves the emergence of the English longbow was at least influenced by weapons control by some oppressive minority or another...