Dean Sparks” eloquent argument “Guns should be limited to law enforcement personnel,” makes perfect sense on a purely academic level, but just won”t translate to the reality in which we live. I grew up in the U.K., a tiny country with strict limitations on gun ownership and I am in complete agreement with the laws for that country, but the U.S. is different, having had, as Dean puts it, “different formative experiences.”
The U.K. and most of Europe have historically outlawed weapons among the general populace for fear of armed revolt, whereas the U.S. embraced the opposite position for exactly the same historical reasons, fear of government oppression. Weapons control has been ingrained into the European psyche for centuries. It”s probably one of the reasons the 2nd Amendment was written in the first place. So now we live in a country with about the same percentage of violent criminals as Europe, only with more than 280 million guns. The problem here is that you can”t “go back” to somewhere you”ve never been.
The classic argument is that the whole gun problem will go away forever if we just ban the guns and that if everyone is legally allowed to own and carry firearms, there will be Wild West gunfights on every city block.
If you read the very detailed results of Dr. John Mott”s University of Chicago 10-year study on U.S. firearm and crime statistics in his book “More Guns, Less Crime,” you may be surprised to learn that virtually every U.S. county or state that enacted concealed-carry laws (CCL) during the study period saw an immediate reduction in violent street crime, while neighboring municipalities that did not have CCL laws saw a corresponding spike in the same types of crime. Florida issued nearly one million CCW permits to its residents to date, and yet I don”t see any tourists cancelling their vacations because of the constant gunfire.
I know this is probably going to enrage the anti-gun supporters, but I believe the people calling for outright gun bans have not even begun to think things through. Banning guns in the U.S. will bring far more problems than it solves.
For a start, the old cliche rings true, only the outlaws will have them. And for the record, I am not a gun advocate nor an NRA member or lobbyist, and my politics are mostly liberal. I don”t even like guns that much. I just happen to be a realist who firmly believes that many, if not all, of the “unpreventable” massacres in this country could have been ended a whole lot earlier if people had legal firearms with which to defend themselves and their fellow theater-goers/diner-customers/office-workers/commuter-train-passengers, etc. It”s also quite conceivable that some massacres would not even have occurred at all; I would imagine walking into a crowded diner with guns blazing is not half so much fun when the diners start shooting back. I love the fact that the UK is mostly gun-free, and the cops don”t carry sidearms, and I would never want to see that change, but that”s there, not here. You can”t even legally own a pistol in the U.K. any more, even if you keep it at a shooting club. And guess what? When they banned pistols outright in 1997 following the Dunblane school massacre, the gun crime rate rose dramatically (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1440764.stm).
Today, there are still more than 12,000 firearm offenses every year in the UK. That”s 35 a day. In an island nation less than 800 miles long, that totally bans ownership of handguns. Where 95 percent of the population agreed with that decision, because they didn”t have a gun infatuation culture and didn”t want one. And you think that banning firearms in the U.S. is going to solve our gun crime problem?
There are 280 million guns in this country ? all Constitutional arguments aside, what do you really think would happen if they were made illegal? One thing immediately comes to mind: mass immigrations of foreign criminals to augment our ample supply of domestic breeds. Mott”s study conclusively proves that the bad guys always go where it”s safest.
The place to start is in honestly examining a culture that glamorizes violence and glorifies brute power. Our kids learn early from their action heroes, video games and movies that virtually any problem can be solved with a healthy dose of graphic violence. Fix that, and you”ve started to fix the “gun problem.”
Phil Hudson
Nice
