Everyone wonders why there's all this violence and murders in the US when it's OK to walk into a shop and buy a fuckin' gun. I know you need documentation & ID but it's not too hard to get all that is it?

Sometimes you've got to wonder......

...and your point is?

Just wanted to know WHY, after all the school massacres, huge murder rates and high availability of weapons, can you still buy them legally?
Surely your constitutional right to bear arms has failed.
Please keep in mind I live in the UK and so view the subject as an outsider.
Thanks

It's a paranoia thing. Gotta stay armed 'cuz my neighbor might be and my government is and the criminals definitely are.

"Everyone wonders why there's all this
violence and murders in the US when it's OK to walk into a shop and buy a fuckin' gun. I know you need documentation & ID but it's not too hard to get all that is it?
Sometimes you've got to wonder......"


Sometimes we've got to wonder about what?

That there are so many like ryanthemeister, who jump into debates like this with their mouths in high gear and brains in neutral?

According to the likes of you, the UK and other anti-gun jurisdictions are "safer" than the US.

I draw the following facts to your attantion:

Actually, crime rates are the same in Switzerland, Israel and Norway, where gun laws are relatively mild, as they are in England, Italy and Japan, where guns are almost entirely prohibited.

In Switzerland, most citizens are members of the national defense force and are issued fully-automatic rifles and ammunition, to be kept at home, ready to be put into use in a national emergency. Outside their formal military duties, the Swiss expend about 60 million rounds of ammunition with the guns each year, mostly for target practice. Crimes with the guns are virtually unheard of. By comparison, "Italy's gun law, 'the most restrictive in Europe,' had left her southern provinces alone with a thousand firearm murders a year, thirty times Switzerland's total."1

England annually has twice as many homicides with firearms as it did before imposing its tough laws. Furthermore, "crime rates for robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft are higher in England (including Wales) than in the United States." And while U.S. crime rates have been declining significantly, the reverse is true in England and Wales.

According to a late 1998 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, "For most U.S. crimes . . . the latest crime rates (1996) are the lowest recorded in the 16-year period from 1981 to 1996. By comparison, English crime rates as measured in both victim surveys and police statistics have all risen since 1981." The murder rate is higher in the U.S. than in England and Wales, but the U.S. rate has been declining, while the rate in England and Wales has remained unchanged.2

Ironically, it is because Japan's crime rates are rising despite its severe gun control laws, that that country is trying to lead a call for worldwide gun control through the United Nations. But, as law professor David Kopel noted in a work voted 1992 Book of the Year award by the American Society of Criminology's Division of International Criminology. Japanese-style gun control requires measures that could not be imposed in the U.S.

In Japan, citizens have fewer protections of the right to privacy, and fewer rights for criminal suspects, than in the United States. Japanese police routinely search citizens at will and twice a year pay "home visits" to citizens' residences. Suspect confession rate is 95% and trial conviction rate is more than 99.9%.

The Tokyo Bar Association has said that the Japanese police routinely engage in torture or illegal treatment. Even in cases where suspects claimed to have been tortured and their bodies bore the physical traces to back their claims, courts have still accepted their confessions. Amnesty International, Kopel noted, calls Japan's police custody system "a flagrant violation of United Nations human rights principles."

But, Kopel wrote, "Without abrogating the Bill of Rights, America could not give its police and prosecutors extensive Japanese-style powers to enforce severe gun laws effectively. Unlike the Japanese, Americans are not already secure from crime, and are therefore less likely to surrender their personal means of defense. More importantly, America has no tradition like Japan's of civil disarmament, of submission to authority, or of trust in the government." Thus, "Foreign style gun control is doomed to failure in America. Foreign gun control comes along with searches and seizures, and with many other restrictions on civil liberties too intrusive for America. . . . It postulates an authoritarian philosophy of government and society fundamentally at odds with the individualist and egalitarian American ethos."3

Perhaps Don. B. Kates, a noted civil rights lawyer, best put the international comparison myth in perspective, writing, "In any society, truly violent people are only a small minority. We know that law-abiding citizens do not commit violent crimes. We know that criminals will neither obey gun bans nor refrain from turning other deadly instruments to their nefarious purposes. . . . In sum, peaceful societies do not need general gun bans and violent societies do not benefit from them."4

1. Richard A.I. Munday, Most Armed and Most Free? (Brightlingsea, Essex:Piedmont Publishing,1996)

2.Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Crime and Justice in the United States and in England ans Wales,1981-1996," Oct.1998

3.David Kopel, The Samurai,The Mountie and the Cowboy: Should American adopt the gun controls of other democracies? (Buffalo N.Y. : Prometheus Books 1992), pp431-432

4."Gun Laws Around the World: Do they work?" The American Gaurdian, Oct., 1997


"Just wanted to know WHY, after all the school massacres, huge murder rates and high availability of weapons, can you still buy them legally?
Surely your constitutional right to bear arms has failed.
Please keep in mind I live in the UK and so view the subject as an outsider.
Thanks"

Heres the part I dearly love about your second posting:

"Surely your constitutional right to bear arms has failed.
Please keep in mind I live in the UK and so view the subject as an outsider.
Thanks"

Shootings in London now average two a day. In the year 2001 murder by firearm totaled 36.

That's a whopping 40% increase on the year 2000!

Firearm related crimes in the UK are on the way up. Firearm related crrime throughout most of the USA, has been trending downwards for several years now.

Are you realy so sure that the Second Ammendment has failed?

Seems to me,that the UK, most of Europe, Asia, and much of the United States, have been doing it your way for about a century now. As a social experiment, gun control has been as convincing a failure as Prohibition.

"Just wanted to know WHY, after all the school massacres, huge murder rates and high availability of weapons, can you still buy them legally?"

Just want to know why with violence tending upward in your country, you prefer to see the law deny honest citizens the most effective tools for self-defence?


"Please keep in mind I live in the UK and so view the subject as an outsider.
Thanks"

I am neither an American, nor a resident of the United States. I also view the subject as an outsider.

So are you swiss then? I can't see one such as youself living in a country with heavy gun restrictions.

I'm an Aussie,Smithee.

Until a few years ago, most Australian States had reasonably comprehensible firearms legislation.

At least in regard to long-arms. Target shooting was, and still is a very popular sport in Australia.(Despite our governments best efforts to harrass the sport out of existence).

Anti-gun politicians here in Oz promised us not only a spectacular fall in "gun violence", but a general decrease in all categories of violent crime.

Needless to say, we have experienced neither.

Gun related crime is UP not down, and crimes involving weapons other than firearms have also escalated.

Police admmit that a very serious black market in banned weapons, (but particularly handguns) has emerged in most Australian cities, and that the average age of armed criminals is getting younger.An equally disturbing trend.

One of the many facts which seems to escape control freaks, is the fact that "stringent firearm control laws", and even outright bans, don't effect criminals, terrorists, religious cultists or "paranoids". Simply put, these categories of humanity are not reknowned for obeying the law at the best of times.

The situation is analogous to Prohibition. The only firearms industry that legislators have the power to destroy, is the legitimate civilian sporting and personal defence industrys.

The criminal trade not only survives. It thrives. Subject to no regulation what so ever other than the economic law of "supply and demand".

guns is business. america is a country of free enterprise. try and stop this train.

Violence in America stays primarally in the "Hood". We have the inalienable right to bear because our Founding Fathers were freaked out from the conduct from His Majesties' army. We are not obsessed with guns. We on the contrary rarely think about it. However, so long as we are One Nation Under God, we will be the country you don't want to invade its civilians! If you slipped through our defenses our people will pick you off at 100 yards.(hehehehe) I'd rather have the right to carry a pistol than not be arrested for possesing pot. What a thought huh? One can carry a hand-gun, but not a handfull of buds! Such is life in the U.S. of A.

Until we, humans, learn the skills to exist together on this floating spinny rock thing we call earth, (and even once, if we're lucky enough, to live off of this planet), there will be weapons of mass and minor destruction. Until greed, envy, distrust, self indulgence, racism, jealousy, mental illness and basically every negative human trait have been surpressed or controlled, there will be weapons of mass and minor destruction to more efficiently take out our fellow human or group of humans that have been deemed undesireable by a mojority or minority of individuals.

If not pistols or rifles and missles, then it would be slings, sticks, blades and stones. There is no way around it, we're going to have to deal with it. Even IF humanity is lucky enough to reach a pinnacle of evolution where we can peacefully comingle, outside threats to the security of self preservation and possesions will still be present. Thus weapons of protection will be deemed necessary to ward off that or those that have the capacity to cause death and destruction.

Within our known realm of physics, (and current social sturctures) he, she or they who possess the most efficient and bountiful amount of weapons will continue to protect, destroy, and preserve nature, effects and lives that are deemed of value on a monetary or personal level. Should a group (democracy, dictatorship, aristocracy, etcetera) attempt to control weapons, how will this be done? Not by asking every citizen or subject to "Please abide by this request." It will be done by they who have the power to control the means to destroy the most efficiently and most quickly, OR he who has the most and best guns wins..

Deal with it.

Make the best of this life, treat others with kindness, try to be the better person. Learn all you can about yourself, those around you and this world we create and are destroying daily. Develop your self spiritually. Seek a better tomorrow so that those who come after us can build on what we are starting to learn. This is how you rid the would of guns.

Education - Understanding - Spiritual Growth - Compassion - Equality - Explore that what makes good, good and figure out how to maintain it. You get my drift...


You won't see the abolishment of weapons in this lifetime.. come back in 3 or 4 thousand years. If some num-nuts hasn't inadvertently or purposely wiped out humanity becasue of their own self induldged, greedy agenda, things might be rather pleasant.


We are all one race - human, we should stive to act like it.

yes and then we can all ride unicorns across feilds of beautiful rainbows.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ryanthemeister:
[B]Just wanted to know WHY, after all the school massacres, huge murder rates and high availability of weapons, can you still buy them legally?
Surely your constitutional right to bear arms has failed.
Please keep in mind I live in the UK and so view the subject as an outsider.

Exactly. You are an outsider. When it comes to American Society. we are some tough son of a bitches. Tougher than we realize because we don't know any different. Plus we are not a Socialist Society like yours.(Thank God!!) But in my Country if say a thug decides to rob a corner store. He is risking the fact that once he points that gun he is justifying himself to be shot in his face from a well prepared clerk. If guns were illegal like drugs they'd still be in criminals' hands. Less being in law abiding citizens. But thats not the reason we can have them. Our brilliant founding Fathers wanted an armed society so it would be suicide to implement a land invasion at our country. And that fact alone is the right and reason behind our Constitutional right. Has it failed? No. You and the rest of the world need to just accept it as a rite of passage as an American. Are we shooting your schools up? Then don't worry about it. If we had an I.R.A. type faction over here our civilians through vigilantism alone would snuff em' out in the middle of the night while thet were sleeping in their beds. Before they furthered their bombings and mayhem. Our various Militias who are armed legally with fully automatic machine guns and the like. But they don't fuck with anybody because they respect their neighbors and aren't mad at us. Just our Government. yet if they got pissed as all hell they would fuck some shit up!!! But they have the right to live like they do. And why not? They are harmless to me and everyone else. And my best friend if shit hits the fan! Freedom is so misunderstood by Socialist Societies. So misunderstood. God Blessed America on July Fourth 1776.

Going into a shop and buying the weapons is the hard way in america It is so much easy for someone to go buy them on the street

Now think to yourself
are you gonna go buy a gun at a store get a backround check wait for it and get it registered to you so you can go commit a crime with it???

Or Go get an unregistered gun from Joe Blow down the road and get it right away????

I agree with the quote above. Tougher Gun Control Laws only keep guns unaccessible to law abiding citizens, while the same criminals who would actually be robbing the corner stores and mugging people would still have their guns.

Whereas guns are also made available in this way to minors leading thus to school shootings and gun accidents amongst children which are quite unheard of in Western Europe.

Then explain why every punk in manchester is armed. also it was called Edinburgh, and besides there was that guy in japan who stabbed like 11 kindergardners to death. Basicly you all just have adults that kill children in mass not a great moral high ground to children that kill children in mass.

If European contries are so crime-free and peaceful because of their gun laws, how do you explain the average Soccer (yeah, I know "Football") riot? How about all the baseball bats they sell in Germany (do skinheads play baseball)? How about your "troubles" in Ulster? Or that (barely)scabbed over wound called (the former) Yugoslavia?

My goodness, aren't you Euros so civilized!

Yeah, so we're a big, violent country who have no compunction about killing each other or anyone else who pisses us off. So what. At least we enjoy ourselves.

Maybe next time you have to deal with a Hitler, Hussein, or Milosevic you all can figure it out on your own!

[This message has been edited by Arisaka (edited 04-14-2002).]

Every hitler like bastard has taken over thru gun control. notice how america hasnt really had on cept cliton while europe and asia have. now figure out why. does anybody kno the answer cuz every american and southerner does, GUN CONTROL

Jamiroquai,

In your post you stated:

Our brilliant founding Fathers wanted an armed society so it would be suicide to implement a land invasion at our country. And that fact alone is the right and reason behind our Constitutional right.

This is only partially correct. The reason for the second ammendment (in fact all the ammendments) was to place limitations on the power of the central government. The early settlers had myriad travails to face and owning a firearm help solve immediate problems. The "average white guys" who wrote the Constitution were of European extraction (primarily British) whose ancestors had been forbidden, by law, to own firearms (remember Oliver Cromwell). This prohibition and its consequences were not lost on Our founding fathers. The "militia" was indeed citizen soldiers...not regular troops.

I'd better stop, sermon is too long.

Nox

The Militia was and is defined as all able bodied men between the ages of 18 and 45.

yeah, and where you come from, i guess there is no violence, right? hey Fuckhead, anywhere in the world there is violence, murder, and all sorts of evil, bad, nasty shit. So if you take away guns, the human race will just start killing of itself with a new weapon. So save us the trouble and shut the fuck up so i can kill someone quick and efficiently without a struggle. Otherwise i would just have to beat them to death with my bare fucking hands.

Im pretty sure that ryan guy doesn't eve come here anymore.

Ryan, are you aware Germany has some of the strictest gun laws in the EU. Did you read about a certain occurance in a German School last week.
Be happy this kid took the gun route because if he wanted to do some serious fucking with life, he could-judging by his determination-have planted a explosive device ala our Tim McVeigh.
Just ask the Jews from Nazi Germany surfing the cosmic plane about Gun Control. Germany in the late 30s "Are you a jew, still owning a gun,ehh. Come this way please."
When the Jews in Warsaw decided to fight it out with the SS they obtained some firepower from the Polish underground but mostly from dead Germans and ammo was always in short supply. Point-Gun Control provides you with the ability to go easily to the pit or take a good gas shower.
It took Stroop more time to defeat these Jews armed with small arms, molotov cocktails, and stolen hand grenades than it did for Germany to requisition Poland.
I am not a Jew or member of any minority group in my country, but this purging will happen again whether it is to welfare babies, blacks, the so-called mentally ill, or anyone else those in power decide to make a scapegoat.
My wife watches Cops on TV all the time. I can't stand more than 2 minutes of it as I watch these poor white-trash cops beat the fuck out of other poor white trash and poor black trash. I describe them as trash because they are simply sheep.
They pick up black subject A with 2 bags of crack. Yes, subject A is destroying his neighborhood but no one is forced to buy crack-therefore no crime in my book. Subject A is now looking at a mandatory minimum of 5 years in which he will most likely obtain either Hepatitis B or C if he is lucky or HIV after his 100 sodomization. Subject A runs and hides in his attic. "Bad Boy" states Cop B,C, D,E and F and doogie Y are gonna get you, what you gonna do? He surrenders peacefully after Cop D says he is sending in the dog.

A hypothetical character named Belarion would say, in my version of this fiction, "send in the dogs you fuck because Belarion shall die this day also and so shall many of you. PS, you might as well take off your vests-there are not gonna help."

You never see this shit happen in affluent neighborhoods on the show. Either they own the cops or would opt out. As Claus Von Bulow said to Alan Dershowitz: no honorable man, not a man such as I, will allow myself to be imprisoned. LIBER OZ

Most of the murders in the US are commited in large urban areas such as LA, NYC, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, etc.

Where I live there hasn't been a murder commited since 1973. Most of the violence involving weapons has been commited in urbanized areas. As I am sure places like Liverpool, London, etc. have large murder rates.

The violence in the US is not as bad as most people think.........

Shad

I have read a few papers on fraud used in the compilation of British crime statistics. I have Also read studies that show that the Average britt is far more fearful of being the victim of a violent crime in their community. These two items would lead me to believe that Either the former is true or that your average britton is pussimilaneous.

Good show Alan, you got me.

I went to the dicitionary on pussimilaneous.

Grrrrrrrrr!

Nox