About Gun Rights

I'm British. Here, our government banned all handguns from private hands in 1997 after what's become known as the Dunblane Massacre (in brief, maniac shoots up primary school, then kills himself). The bill passed in response was a bad piece of legislation, loosely worded, poorly drafted and having had little debate (subsequent amendments have cleaned it up).

Since the ban, firearms crime has gone up. That should be logical since a new law creates new crimes. The rate of firearm use in crimes has remained mostly static. That sounds counter-intuitive but the plain fact is that in 1997, there were around 100,000 firearms in private hands, one of those went nuts and committed a terrible crime but the vast majority of those firearms were held by people like myself and my father who were no danger to anyone.

There seems to be a lot of wishful thinking about firearms. Top of the list is the impression that if we ban firearms from private owners, gun crime will disappear. It won't. Illegal use of firearms has stayed about the same for the simple reason that making something illegal does not stop the people who don't obey the law in the first place. Tougher sentences for firearms offences hasn't made any difference for the same reason tougher sentencing never makes a difference: Because most criminals don't consider their sentence prior to being caught. You or I would, that's why we aren't criminals. Organised crime figures might consider it since it's their business but the average street thug with a saturday-night special, he doesn't consider his sentence until he's caught. Then there's the idea that the people killed by firearms would still be alive. Some of them undoubtedly would be but we can divide firearm deaths into two categories: Habitual criminals and civilian. The habitual criminal doesn't care what the law says, he's keeping his gun. The civilian, deprived of a firearm, is just as likely to grab a knife or a hammer. Lots of things are potentially lethal.

The idea that accessable firearms cause crime is simply not supported by the evidence. Saying that usually leads to a firestorm because gun-rights, like abortion, Irish nationalism and football, is one of those issues people make up their minds on the first time they encounter it and thereafter, will never ever be convinced otherwise, no matter what the evidence says. Still, the fact remains that other nations with high levels of firearms in private hands (i.e. Switzerland) do not have correspondingly high levels of gun violence. Here, 1 out of 100,000 firearms owners committed a crime. I'm sorry for his victims and their families, they have my sympathies but 1 in a hundred thousand is no good reason to ban anything. I'm sure rather more than that number of car owners drive drunk but we're not looking to ban cars or alcohol. Those numbers suggest that it is not the firearms which are to blame for crime, it is a cultural problem. If anyone would like to talk about those cultural problems, that could be an interesting discussion but right now, everyone is fixated on a symptom of the problem (firearm related crimes) rather than the problem itself.

That said, nor is the 2nd Ammendment an absolute guarentee of firearms ownership. The 2nd was written in the days when the flintlock was the height of firearms technology. It can be fairly safely assumed that your right to own a howitzer was not high on their list of priorities. I still think a test in basic firearms safety should be mandatory before purchasing a firearm. My interest there is not in taking your guns away but cutting down on the roughly 1000 deaths and gods alone know how many injuries caused each year by unsafe handling of a firearm (my father served as a range officer for a while, you simply wouldn't believe some of the stories he can tell). Somewhere between "ban 'em all" and "give guns to every high schooler" is a sensible middle ground and surely that's the area we should be aiming for (pun intended).

Actually, it's impossible to say if the incidence of child porn has decreased but the cops are getting better at finding and catching the bastards responsible.

Many people don't realize what has happened in your country, but you're absolutely right. The fact is, criminals will always have weapons; they always find a way to acquire them. When handguns were banned in your country, did people keep what they already had, or were they required to turn them in? What happened, exactly?

In the U.S. I'm not aware of any requirement in any of the states to take a gun safety course before purchasing a gun. I could be wrong. However, it seems that responsible people sign up for safety courses and practice regularly; those who are serious about protecting themselves and their families understand the need for this.

To answer your questions: ALL handguns were banned entirely from civilian hands with the exception of antiques. The ones that people already had could either be turned in, deactivated (i.e. rendered non-working) or sold outside the country (which means they're probably shooting up some third-world nation right now). The people who owned firearms that were turned in were paid the list price for them (around 3/4 of market price) and this whole process took roughly thee-to-six months from when the law became active (because of the nature of the British/Scottish divide, Scots got longer).

I'd like to make safety courses mandatory before you purchase a firearm and repeated at regular intervals (say, every two or three years) thereafter. A lot of people seem to regard their firearm as a point-and-shoot talisman. They don't understand that a firearm is a tool which requires skill and practice to master. If my own country ever comes to it's sense, I'd support the same precautions here.

The revolutionaries made use of cannons capable of destroying buildings, which were owned by private citizens. John Hancock, who was a pirate, owned a warship with multiple cannons, as did other people in the colonies. Those didn't have the power and accuracy of modern artillery, but they were still quite destructive.

It's still legal to own black powder cannons with no special licensing or taxes in the US, and also to own modern artillery if you can pass a Federal background check and pay the massive cost to buy one along with a $200 tax on each round of already-expensive ammo. Somehow neither type of weapon has seen much use by criminals.

The Queen Anne's Revenge was the name of Blackbeard's flagship.

I can actually see why no-one would bother legislating black-powder cannon. Criminals liek cheap, disposable firearms, not enormous siege weapons.