After last night's news about a mass shooting in Virginia it was only a matter of time before people started talking about the right to bear arms being the reason for such things to happen. Sky News is running a poll that suggest people think the gun laws are not strict enough in the US. However, in my knowledge and experience of gun laws in the US this view is jaded by misunderstanding of US gun control.
The vast majority of British people, I imagine, think that you can just walk into a shop in America, hand over some money, and walk out with a semi-automatic weapon or an assault rifle. That however is simply not the case. If you want a gun you face, quite rightly, background checks. If you want to carry a gun it is also the case in a vast majority of states that you must carry it on show and not concealed without a license to do so.
Knee-jerk gun control laws may seem like an appropriate measure, however, as we've seen in recent month in the UK, where we have strict gun laws, they are not holding back gun crime. The logic that strict gun laws will reduce gun crime is fundamentally flawed. I should say that I'm not advocating scrapping our gun laws here, more that the hand-wringing that will occur in the UK about these shootings in Virginia ought not be framed in the "stricter gun control would've stopped this" terms.
It's a cliche of the pro-gun lobby to say "gun's don't kill people, people kill people", but within that argument there is actually a subtle truth. For no matter what you ban, be it guns, knives, baseball bats or frying pans, if someone wants to kill people they will find a way to do it - by for example - purchasing acetone and some basic ingredients and putting them in a rucksack and getting on a train. In virtually every case of "mass shootings" the perpetrators turn the gun on themself, in that sense it makes them not much different to a suicide bomber only the bomb was bullets.
The next few day of British press comment will be interesting as I expect the usual suspects will roll out the column inches on how gun control is the only way to stop this. If the US chooses to take that route then that is of course their business, but if it does and then shootings happen again, you can guarantee that the answer will be "stricter gun laws" yet again. Knee-jerk banning is, after all, much easier than realising that human beings can be very nasty and will find ways to kill people if they really want to. The most interesting thing is that you never hear them calling for the ingredients of an acetone bomb to be banned.
8 comments:
You beat me to saying much the same thing. The entire populations of Israel and Switzerland are armed to the teeth, and gun rampages are remarkably rare in those parts.
One benefit of the American gun laws is that burglary is not as common as it is over here!
But as shown by both the USA's & UK's gun laws, it does not matter which way you go, if someone is determined to go out on to murder they will.
Well there are some loopholes in the current laws, for example you don't need a background check to buy a gun from a gun show, which is how the kids a Columbine got their guns. Loopholes like that would surely need to be closed.
Also you have the problem of gun laws being decided at state level meaning you have regions with relatively free gun ownership bordering regions where guns are heavily restricted. It’s the mix that allows guns to travel where they can do maximum harm.
The fact that there has been 36 school shooting, 37 including this one, since Dunblane in Sctotland shows that the US does have a real problem with guns that does need addressing urgently.
"The fact that there has been 36 school shooting, 37 including this one, since Dunblane in Sctotland shows that the US does have a real problem with guns that does need addressing urgently."
Sorry, how does it show that?
Well I know no other Western country that averages nearly 4 school shootings a year (over the past 10 years). Surely that indicates that there is a problem with guns being in the hands of children.
The US as more gun deaths as a % of the population than any other western country. Does that not indicate a potential problem?
I am not saying that the answer is necessarily to ban guns or bring in gun controls; maybe the answer is to remove current gun laws and let everyone carry concealed weapons as some on the US right would like.
There is the small matter of the second amendment to consider.
Buying in gun shops is regulated, indeed. Buying secondhand is pretty easy though, as you'd expect.
The reason that UK-type gun control wouldn't work in the US, even if there were Constitutional justification for it, is that there are just too many guns here already. They don't suddenly become useless just because they are illegal. Guns here are extremely widespread.
This VTech shooting, as I wrote on my blog today (link in name) is not very logically relevant to the gun control debate, as events like this make up a tiny, tiny fraction of gun-related murders (or crime-related murders). It's only used as an example (by both sides; the gun control and gun ownership advocates are both spinning this) because it's getting so much news coverage and has upset so many people (two not unconnected facts). Additionally, if one campaign didn't weigh in, the other surely would and the overal guns debate is a lot more important to both sides than 32 +1 dead students are.
Sheesh. In the USA they have something like 11,000 homicides with guns among 300M. At that rate here in Britain we should expect around 2,200 (20%). In fact the figure is about 5% of that 20% = c 100. This is very low. While US's is incredibly high. In Canada with a very similar gun ownership for hunting etc their gun homicides are even lower per head than ours. Thank heaven for Michael Moore! Like Moore I learned to fire rifles and pistols as a youth though I am not a member of the NRA. There was a bloke in Hall with me who had TWO magnums and a sawn off and brought them in at least once. I forget his name. Thank goodness we don't have US freaking frontier mentality and might-makes-right to quite the same degree over here.
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