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I know this is touchy controversial subject so I am warning people to tone down on the emotion!
But ever since I hear this debate since Australia has stronger gun Laws than the US as a result it is safer, but isn't this simplistic way of looking at it and isn't this just an extreme comparison, what about other comparisons that appear to be in the middle.?
Switzerland has lax gun laws and seems as safe, if not safer than Australia, what do you have to say about that?
So the whole point of me posting this post was to ask people whether the Laws and Crime rate or lack thereof is the result of the laws on guns or are there other factors?
I've always been skeptical of the view that strictness equals lower rates of crime???
Please share your views and experiences and anything else you see fit?
The gun laws in Australia are draconian. The Gov. decided to ban most guns and they offered the law abiding citizens buy back programs and when that time was up they confiscated what was left and the people who held firm to what was once their right became open for prosecution.
Nothing like treating your citizens like criminals.
The arguement is that if there were no guns that crime would be reduced which at first sounds like a good plan but in actuality it doesn't work because as the saying goes "If you outlaw guns only the outlaws will have them."
We have cities like Chicago, Detroit, DC, NYC and others that have very strict gun laws but they are the centers of gun crimes and murders. Why?
It shows that criminals don't care about laws so the more and more laws that are put on the books will only restrict the rights of the law abiding further.
The true problem is the mentality of anger and fear. People are so angry today and any slight misstep quickly escalates from a war of words to fists to weapons. If you add in alcohol or drugs most situations get worse.
It all comes down to personal responsibility. There are people who should not be allowed to own a gun just like there are people who should not be allowed to drive a car due to the danger to the general public. The far deadlier cars considering the amount of daily auto accidents compared to daily gun deaths are not going away but our Gov. wants to ban guns or I should say certain guns that look scary.
In the end if every single gun disappeared tomorrow evil would still find a way to kill as we saw in Nice France when a truck was used to kill.
Your right to defend yourself should not be based on some statistics... There are much more factors into crime rate evaluation than strictness/laxness of gun laws.
Although I heard that after guns were forbidden in Australia, number of home invasions were doubled just after a couple of years.
There is an old saying people use, "guns don't kill people, people kill people."
As with most sayings, there's truth to it. This is why things, such as this, work in one country but not in another. Every country is not the same. Cultures and peoples are very different. Very different. Our welfare society breeds not requiring people to work; and this begets idle time, and this begets crime, and this begets violence, and this begets gangs, and this begets crime with guns...
Add to it our mental health system in shambles, the extreme and graphic token violence in movies, music, tv, video games..., spousal abuse, sex slave trade in this country, drug use and legalization... and guns become just a small part of the equation. Really, more of a means to an end.
If we want to seriously do something about gun violence, we have to start by ending the welfare state, building up our mental health system, stop tolerating violence towards women, promote work over sucking off the system, somehow curtailing token and graphic violence in all forms of media, get a handle on drugs... and then we can change the attitudes that bring about this gun violence. And then I think we can more successfully tackle the issue of guns.
There is an old saying people use, "guns don't kill people, people kill people."
As with most sayings, there's truth to it. This is why things, such as this, work in one country but not in another. Every country is not the same. Cultures and peoples are very different. Very different. Our welfare society breeds not requiring people to work; and this begets idle time, and this begets crime, and this begets violence, and this begets gangs, and this begets crime with guns...
Add to it our mental health system in shambles, the extreme and graphic token violence in movies, music, tv, video games..., spousal abuse, sex slave trade in this country, drug use and legalization... and guns become just a small part of the equation. Really, more of a means to an end.
If we want to seriously do something about gun violence, we have to start by ending the welfare state, building up our mental health system, stop tolerating violence towards women, promote work over sucking off the system, somehow curtailing token and graphic violence in all forms of media, get a handle on drugs... and then we can change the attitudes that bring about this gun violence. And then I think we can more successfully tackle the issue of guns.
Well said. I was eluding to this when I mentioned "personal responsibility" in my post.
Most gun owners are very responsible and follow the laws. It is the criminals and the destructive paths that they are on that cause the most problems.
Before we had mass shootings we had a rash of disgruntled postal workers bringing a gun to work to shoot their supervisor and coworkers. How did the post office handle that since we never hear of that happening anymore?
When it comes to mass shootings when did people start taking the leap from woe is my depressing life and I'm going to kill myself to woe is my depressing life and I'm going to kill as many innocent people as possible? Is it that the mass shooter wants to be remembered for something?
America does need an attitude adjustment and people need to start taking personal responsibility for their actions.
In Japan, there are virtually no guns and virtually no gun-related deaths. There is still crime of course, and there are still deaths, some of them being either murders or suicides. The problem with guns however is that they do their terrible work so much more swiftly and surely than other tools do. The NRA et al. do not take responsibility for this. Nor do they choose to recognize that guns in Wyoming (not quite 6 people per square mile) are a different thing from guns in Manhattan (more than 72,000 people per square mile).
The concerns over guns actually center on notions of harm-reduction. Mass killings are certainly horrific, but they are a drop in the bucket considering that we have more than 30,000 gun-related deaths to deal with annually and more than 200,000 (very expensive) gunshot wounds to treat each year as well, a great number of those not covered by insurance. It was not necessary to confiscate automobiles in order to reduce auto-related casualties from even worse levels. Perhaps if we actually thought about it, there would be ways to reduce the harm that is done by guns as well.
Different countries have different cultures, any comparison is apples and oranges.
Britain passed draconian gun laws back in the 30s. A man that I worked with many years ago told me that he enlisted in the RAF at the beginning of WW2. He said when he was assigned to guard duty he was handed a wooden pole that was sharpened on one end. "What's this he asked" and was told that it was a pike and it was the only weapon they had to give him. The gun makers had been driven out of business and there was no one to equip the military.
Gun crimes have more to do with the people that live in any country/city than any laws.
Most European or Asian countries that outlawed guns never had a high crime rate to begin with.
Take Boston and Baltimore for example. They are both the same size cities with strict gun laws.
Boston had 38 murders last year Baltimore had 344. The difference is the demographics of each city.
More guns do not make you safer. Moving away from thugs does!!
The U.S. does have a ridiculous amount of guns per capita. Far more than any other country - double the nearest competitor, Switzerland.
The U.S. homicide rate is high by "civilized country" standards. We have a higher murder rate than even borderline 3rd world countries like Turkey, Estonia, or Chile. But far lower than places like Russia. But as the authors note, the data bogs down when you get into the definitions of homicide that vary by country.
So what conclusions can we draw?
1) The U.S. situation proves that the raw number of guns does not directly correlate with more crime. Obviously there are countries with far, far more violent crime than the U.S. but far fewer guns (ie Honduras, the most dangerous country in the world at the moment).
2) The U.S. does indeed have more crime than it's "developed nation 'peers.'"
Generally speaking, the richer the country, the lower the murder rate. The U.S. does buck that trend - it has a murder rate close the world median - basically at borderline 3rd world murder rates despite being the richest country in the world and obviously FAR from a 3rd world country. So something is going on.
In other words, we don't have a good answer and need more data.
Within the U.S., there is similarly no obvious pattern. Some states have more guns & more crime, ie: Louisiana, but others, ie: Wyoming, have more guns but less crime:
The data show that both gun control and gun nut people are wrong. If more guns caused more homicides, the U.S. homicide rate should be the highest in the world. Far from it. If more guns = less crime, than the U.S. should have a negligible crime rate. Obviously not the case, as the U.S.'s crime rate is relatively high for a developed country.
If anything, proximity to narcotics trade, organized crime & political instability seems to closely correlate with homicides. Raw #'s of guns seems to be an irrelevant factor, but the U.S. is an extreme outlier on both absolute and percentage #'s of guns and thus it's possible that no international comparisons are useful.
The U.S. has a burgeoning narcotics trade but it has neither powerful organized crime (ie: Russia or Mexico) nor political instability. So there is something seriously going wrong in the U.S. that its 1st world peers do not have. FWIW, with the exception of Canada the entire western hemisphere has high murder rates, particularly high firearm murders, compared to the world.
The countries with strict gun control do have lower crime rates... but it's not clear that the gun control is a cause for that. They seem to have had lower crime rates in general.
Australia is that solid black line and they instituted their gun buy-back in 1996-97. As you can see, their homicide rate was steady before and after that, having gone into decline lately. Gun control may or may not have been a factor in the recent decline. Probably a little but the recession seems to be a more important factor. Great Britain instituted its handgun ban in 1996. That is also a country that did not have many murders before.
As you can also see, the U.S. has traditionally been less safe, with more than double the murder rate of these other countries for whatever reason and a particular spike in the 1960s continuing to about the year 2000. All this is telling us is that the numbers of guns themselves that exist in a country seem not to be a cogent factor influencing that country's overall homicide rate.
There may be good reasons for gun control, but crime and shooting frequency are not one of them.
Last edited by redguard57; 08-30-2016 at 10:47 PM..
The gun laws in Australia are draconian. The Gov. decided to ban most guns and they offered the law abiding citizens buy back programs and when that time was up they confiscated what was left and the people who held firm to what was once their right became open for prosecution.
Nothing like treating your citizens like criminals.
The arguement is that if there were no guns that crime would be reduced which at first sounds like a good plan but in actuality it doesn't work because as the saying goes "If you outlaw guns only the outlaws will have them."
We have cities like Chicago, Detroit, DC, NYC and others that have very strict gun laws but they are the centers of gun crimes and murders. Why?
It shows that criminals don't care about laws so the more and more laws that are put on the books will only restrict the rights of the law abiding further.
The true problem is the mentality of anger and fear. People are so angry today and any slight misstep quickly escalates from a war of words to fists to weapons. If you add in alcohol or drugs most situations get worse.
It all comes down to personal responsibility. There are people who should not be allowed to own a gun just like there are people who should not be allowed to drive a car due to the danger to the general public. The far deadlier cars considering the amount of daily auto accidents compared to daily gun deaths are not going away but our Gov. wants to ban guns or I should say certain guns that look scary.
In the end if every single gun disappeared tomorrow evil would still find a way to kill as we saw in Nice France when a truck was used to kill.
Well no sir, our gun laws in Chicago got knocked down by the Supreme Court a few years ago. I don't know how much this makes national news (ok, I do), but our murder/gun crime rates are still a-climbing.
Also, now I'm wondering what draconian means exactly... I thought ancient/antiquated and violent or something like that, but maybe not, because banning weapons is a pretty modern thing, having it done by legislative process is pretty sophisticated, and criminal prosecution in a court of law is the least "draconian" punishment I can think of.
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Not quite
(ok, I do), but our murder/gun crime rates are still a-climbing.
