Guns, pros and cons!

Pete McCluskey.

Lifetime Supporter
:evil:
Crime up Down Under

<!-- deck -->Since Australia's gun ban, armed robberies increase 45%

<HR SIZE=1>[SIZE=-1]Posted: March 03, 2000
1:00 am Eastern

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By Jon E. Dougherty
<!-- copyright -->[SIZE=-1]© 2010 WorldNetDaily.com [/SIZE]
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Since Australia banned private ownership of most guns in 1996, crime has risen dramatically on that continent, prompting critics of U.S. gun control efforts to issue new warnings of what life in America could be like if Congress ever bans firearms.
After Australian lawmakers passed widespread gun bans, owners were forced to surrender about 650,000 weapons, which were later slated for destruction, according to statistics from the Australian Sporting Shooters Association.
The bans were not limited to so-called "assault" weapons or military-type firearms, but also to .22 rifles and shotguns. The effort cost the Australian government about $500 million, said association representative Keith Tidswell.
Though lawmakers responsible for passing the ban promised a safer country, the nation's crime statistics tell a different story:
  • Countrywide, homicides are up 3.2 percent;
  • Assaults are up 8.6 percent;
  • Amazingly, armed robberies have climbed nearly 45 percent;
  • In the Australian state of Victoria, gun homicides have climbed 300 percent;
  • In the 25 years before the gun bans, crime in Australia had been dropping steadily;
  • There has been a reported "dramatic increase" in home burglaries and assaults on the elderly.
At the time of the ban, which followed an April 29, 1996 shooting at a Port Arthur tourist spot by lone gunman Martin Bryant, the continent had an annual murder-by-firearm rate of about 1.8 per 100,000 persons, "a safe society by any standards," said Tidswell. But such low rates of crime and rare shootings did not deter then-Prime Minister John Howard from calling for and supporting the weapons ban.
Since the ban has been in effect, membership in the Australian Sporting Shooters Association has climbed to about 112,000 -- a 200 percent increase.
Australian press accounts report that the half a million-plus figure of weapons turned in to authorities so far only represents a tiny fraction of the guns believed to be in the country.
According to one report, in March 1997 the number of privately-held firearms in Australia numbered around 10 million. "In the State of Queensland," for example, the report said only "80,000 guns have been seized out of a total of approximately 3 million, a tiny fraction."
And, said the report, 15 percent of the more than half a million guns collected came from licensed gun dealers.
Moreover, a black market allegedly has developed in the country. The report said about 1 million Chinese-made semi-automatics, "one type of gun specifically targeted by the new law," have been imported and sold throughout the country.
Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, said the situation in Australia reminds him of Great Britain, where English lawmakers have passed similar restrictive gun control laws.
"In fact, when you brought up the subject of this interview, I didn't hear you clearly -- I thought you were talking about England, not Australia," Pratt told WorldNetDaily. "It's hard to tell the difference between them."
Pratt said officials in both countries can "no longer control what the criminals do," because an armed society used to serve as a check on the power and influence of the criminal element.
Worse, Pratt said he was "offended by people who say, basically, that I don't have a right to defend myself or my family." Specifically, during debates with gun control advocates like members of Handgun Control, Inc. or similar organizations, Pratt said he routinely asks them if they're "against self defense."
Most often, he said, "they don't say anything -- they just don't answer me. But occasionally I'll get one of them to admit it and say 'yes.'"
Pratt said, based on the examples of democracies that have enacted near-total bans on private firearm ownership, that the same thing could happen to Americans. His organization routinely researches and reports incidents that happen all over the country when private armed citizens successfully defend themselves against armed robbers or intruders, but "liberals completely ignore this reality."
Pratt, who said was scheduled to appear in a televised discussion later in the day about a shooting incident between two first graders in Michigan on Tuesday, said he was in favor of allowing teachers to carry weapons to protect themselves and their students on campus.
Pratt pointed to the example of a Pearl, Mississippi teacher who, in 1997, armed with his own handgun, was able to blunt the killing spree of Luke Woodham.
"By making schools and even entire communities 'gun free zones,' you're basically telling the criminal element that you're unarmed and extremely vulnerable," Pratt said.
Pratt also warned against falling into the gun registration trap.
"Governments will ask you to trust them to allow gun registration, then use those registration lists to later confiscate the firearms," he said. "It's happened countless times throughout history."
Sarah Brady, head of Handgun Control, Inc., issued a statement calling on lawmakers in Michigan and in Washington to pass more restrictive gun access laws.
"This horrible tragedy should send a clear message to lawmakers in Michigan and around the country: they should quickly pass child access prevention or 'safe storage' laws that make it a crime to leave a loaded firearm where it is accessible by children," Brady said.
Brady also blamed gun makers for the Michigan shooting.
"The responsibility for shootings like these do not stop at the hands of the gun owner," Brady said. "Why are ... gun makers manufacturing weapons that a six-year old child can fire? This makes no rational sense. When will gun makers realize that they bear a responsibility to make sure that their products do not mete out preventable deaths, and that they do not warrant nor deserve special protection from the law to avoid that burden? Instead of safeguarding the gun makers, we should be childproofing the guns."
In contrast to near-complete bans in Australia and Great Britain, many U.S. states have passed liberal concealed carry laws that allow private citizens to obtain a permit to carry a loaded gun at all times in most public places. According to Yale University researcher John R. Lott, formerly of the University of Chicago and a gun control analyst who has conducted the most extensive study on the impact of concealed carry laws in the nation's history, the more liberal the right to carry, the less violent crime occurs.
Lott, who examined a mass of crime data spanning decades in all 3,200-plus counties in the United States, concluded that the most important factor in the deterrence of violent crimes were increased police presence and longer jail sentences. However, his research also demonstrated that liberal concealed carry laws were at the top of the list of reasons violent crime has dropped steadily since those laws began to be enacted by state legislatures a decade ago.
The Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, a division of Handgun Control, Inc., disagreed with Lott's findings, as well as the overall assumption that a reduction in the availability of guns in society reduces violent crime.
"Using violent crime data provided by the FBI, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence determined that, on average over a five-year period, violent crime dropped almost 25 percent in states that limit or prohibit carrying concealed weapons," the Center said. "This compares with only a 11 percent drop in states with lax concealed carry weapons (CCW) laws. Moreover, states with some of the strongest laws against concealed weapons experienced the largest drops."
Without naming its source, the Center also claimed "a prominent criminologist from Johns Hopkins University has stated that Lott's study was so flawed that 'nothing can be learned of it,' and that it should not be used as the basis for policy-making."
In his most recent research, Lott noted a few examples of mass shootings in schools when teachers who were armed, albeit illegally, were able to prevent further loss of life among students indiscriminately targeted by other students with guns. Ironically, both Lott and Handgun Control acknowledge that the reams of gun control laws on the books in Washington and in all 50 states have been ineffective in eradicating mass shootings or preventing children from bringing weapons to school. However, Lott's research indicates the criminal element has been successful in obtaining weapons despite widespread bans and gun control laws, while HCI continues to push for more laws that further restrict, license or eliminate handguns and long guns. <!-- intelliTXT -->

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<!-- author bio -->
Jon E. Dougherty is a Missouri-based writer and the author of "Illegals: The Imminent Threat Posed by Our Unsecured U.S.-Mexico Border."
 
I can live without them...

Me to.

With regard to the more guns equal more or less murders argument, I always assumed more guns equal more deaths.

However, it seems it is not that simple and even the experts seem to find it difficult to say yay or nay.

Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy [Vol. 30

If more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less
death, it should follow, all things being equal, (1) that geographic
areas with higher gun ownership should have more
murder than those with less gun ownership; (2) that demographic
groups with higher gun ownership should be more
prone to murder than those with less ownership; and (3) that
historical eras in which gun ownership is widespread should
have more murder than those in which guns were fewer or
less widespread. As discussed earlier, these effects are not
present. Historical eras, demographic groups, and geographic
areas with more guns do not have more murders
than those with fewer guns. Indeed, those with more guns
often, or even generally, have fewer murders.

Of course, all other things may not be equal. Obviously,
many factors other than guns may promote or reduce the
number of murders in any given place or time or among particular
groups. And it may be impossible even to identify
these factors, much less to take account of them all. Thus any
conclusions drawn from the kinds of evidence presented earlier
in this paper must necessarily be tentative.


Acknowledging this does not, however, blunt the force of
two crucial points. The first regards the burden of proof.
Those who assert the mantra, and urge that public policy be
based on it, bear the burden of proving that more guns do
equal more death and fewer guns equal less death. But they
cannot bear that burden because there simply is no large
number of cases in which the widespread prevalence of
guns among the general population has led to more murder.
By the same token, but even more importantly, it cannot
be shown consistently that a reduction in the number of
guns available to the general population has led to fewer
deaths. Nor is the burden borne by speculating that the reason
such cases do not appear is that other factors always
intervene.
The second issue, allied to the burden of proof, regards
plausibility. On their face, the following facts from Tables 1
and 2 suggest that gun ownership is irrelevant, or has little
relevance, to murder: France and neighboring Germany
have exactly the same, comparatively high rate of gun ownership,
yet the French murder rate is nearly twice the German;
France has infinitely more gun ownership than
Luxembourg, which nevertheless has a murder rate five
times greater, though handguns are illegal and other types
of guns sparse; Germany has almost double the gun ownership
rate of neighboring Austria yet a similarly very low
murder rate; the Norwegian gun ownership rate is over
twice the Austrian rate, yet the murder rates are almost
identical.
And then there is Table 3, which shows Slovenia, with 66%
more gun ownership than Slovakia, nevertheless has roughly
one‐third less murder per capita; Hungary has more than 6
times the gun ownership rate of neighboring Romania but a
lower murder rate; the Czech Republic’s gun ownership rate
is more than 3 times that of neighboring Poland, but its murder
rate is lower; Poland and neighboring Slovenia have exactly
the same murder rate, though Slovenia has over triple
the gun ownership per capita.
 
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In a previous thread, Jim Rosenthal posted this :-

The difference between a gun and any other weapon:
-a gun requires less effort on the part of its user than other weapons do.
-a gun is able to perform its job (of throwing a missile at something) without having to be in close proximity to the thing that it is aimed at.
-a gun takes less time to do what it does than any other weapon.
-a gun is smaller than MOST other weapons (not all)
-a gun is more amenable to impulse use than any other weapon. Even if you decide to run someone over with a car, it still takes a lot longer to aim it and use it than it does a gun.

Finally, as a physician, working in emergency departments, who has spent my entire professional life trying to keep people alive and well (including people injured with firearms) I take issue with the idea, implied above as I understand it, that a shepherd or sheep dog- a protector of other living beings- necessarily has to be armed. Frankly, I think that it takes a lot more guts to confront an angry irrational person WITHOUT having a gun in your possession than it does when you know you can shoot them. And yet I do this frequently. I don't know of any ER physicians who carry a gun at work; it seems totally opposed to what we do. And although I am fairly diplomatic, and work hard at it, I've taken down people half my age and quite a bit bigger than me with my bare hands, when I had to. I don't like it, but if the staff and other patients are in harm's way, I'll do it. And of course I'm scared, but doing what you see needs done whether you are scared or not seems to me to be what a responsible grownup does.

My country is awash in both guns and trouble. There is a relationship there, and although I am not an advocate of banning guns, I wish they were far better controlled.

Jim,

You nailed it on the head for me there, 100%.

Reading some of the other posts in this thread is interesting, and the facts (such as they are) make a good point. Some of the information we have seems counter-intuitive,and it appears that a country's culture often defines it's crime rate, not necessarily the guns, so if these facts are true, then I'll happily admit that this seems to be a much more complex issue than just "ban the guns".

Personally, I still don't like 'em though.
 

Ron Earp

Admin
Pros - I have a lot of them.
Cons - I would like more, they are expensive, and I am running out of space to store them.

How'd I do?
 
Graham makes the point that I put somewhere in a previous thread. Its the violence in society that creates the crime. Sure guns may help to boost the violence in a deadly manner, but its the person at days end that pulls the trigger.

Just a statistic I remember from a gun friend here in the UK. When the UK began licensing shotguns after Dunblane in 1997?, the estimated population of shotguns was 150,000. 100,000 shotguns were registered. Makes one wonder where the other 50,000 went?

Well put Ron.
 
Jim, You nailed it! It's the "who", the people that boost violence, the gun, like the knife, stick of dynamite, bottle of gas, car, hammer, ect, are inanimate objects that need unstable people to use them to cause violence. So, you need to keep guns away from unstable people, just as you would try to keep unstable people from operating a car or a plane. Look what 19 people did with 2 planes, what 3 people with a van full of explosives did in Oklahoma. Killing on a big scale is usually not done with guns!
 
What tool do you grab when you go to work on your car? Do you use an adjustable wrench for every task? Do you own a ratchet wrench? How about air tools?

Firearms are the target of so much attention due to their being extremely good at what they are designed to do. They are tools and anyone that tries to make them into anything else is being a bit self deluding.

I hear the argument that people shouldn't carry a weapon because a criminal will take it away from them and they will become even more likely to be hurt. Then that same group tells me the next week that having the weapon makes the owner more likely to act upon impulse and cause grievous harm to another. Which is it? Am I a victim because I own one or a felon waiting for his chance?

What is a long screwdriver used for? Well a pry bar of course. What about a gun? Obviously a murder weapon. My point? The misuse of the tool is not the fault of the tool, but the person using it.

Want to stem the occurrence of gun crime? Remove gun criminals.

By the way. I hold a Federal Firearms License and will be happy to order you any gun you want. I will then legally ship that to a convenient FFL holder near you for pick up. I will also sell you a hammer if you pass the background checks.
 

Doug S.

The protoplasm may be 72, but the spirit is 32!
Lifetime Supporter
I have guns at both homes I own.

With the exception of a family heirloom pistol from the 1800's, the rest are specifically for hunting.

I live near Houston, where the most disgusting part of my day is hearing how many people were killed the day before....most often with guns.

My guns have not been used for over 20 years. Why?

I grew tired of violently ending the lives of the animals I hunted, so I found alternative ways (where I live in Kansas, the most common quarry is pheasant....I found a pheasant farm where I can buy fresh pheasant for $7 each).

I live a quiet life in a very quiet neighborhood, way back at the back of a subdivision with only one entrance and no through traffic. I don't need a gun, the only time I have ever been burglarized was when the city hired a landscape company to mow my lawn when I was absent for an extended period and the landscape company stole property from my yard. My second home is in a small, rural town....once a windstorm blew the front door off and it was lying in the front yard for 3 weeks before I could arrange from 1,000 miles away to have it put back up. Nobody entered the home, nothing was missing. They had a murder there about 4 years ago (a love triangle), it was the first murder they had in 20 years. There is no need to lock doors on houses or cars there, essentially no crime.

So, why do I have guns? Most are family heirlooms, owned by long gone family members and are being preserved by me for the family. At some point in time, they will be transferred to other family members.

Bottom line, I can't imagine using my guns on another human being. I realize there are those out there who would, so I manage to live in two very nice places where the incidence of crime is lower, reducing the need to deal with the "need" for a gun.

My girlfriend packs heat, though :stunned: .

Cheers from Doug!!
 
+1 Doug. But I really like shooting clay pigeons at my local sporting layout (its really great fun). And shooting my Kimber .243 at 600 yards and landing numerous shots within a foot of the bullseye is also a trip.

I was car jacked 7 years ago, and had I been in the states, the jackers would have probably packed a pistol. Had I responded with a firearm, I probably wouldn't be writing this today. Who knows I may have had the jump on them and taken them out. Don't know, but had I packed a pistol, I would have made sure I knew how to use it.

I prefer to go on my own and trust that I can get out of a situation without the use of a firearm. Even at home, one has to keep one's guns locked up or one is in violation of the law.
 
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