All Hail the Second Amendment

[Optimistic Mysanthrope]

When will you figure out that banning something does not make it go away?

Something has to make it go away. Guns are a problem, plain and simple. Denying that is erring on the side of ignorance.

Stating that people need guns to defend themselves from criminals who have guns merely perpetuates the problem, because it ensures guns remain within society.

To completely remove guns from everyone, properly doing it so that no guns go underground to be illegally sold, is the only logical course at this point.

As someone else pointed out, this was tried in the UK and failed. It simply cannot be done. Even with the kind of border control methods that would make even the most extreme isolationists cringe, guns will still get into the hands of criminals.

The uk handgun ban was introduced 1996 after a gunman went into a primary school and proceeded to kill 15 children aged 5-6 and their teacher. 11 children and 3 adults were rushed to hospital and one of those children was dead on arrival. What really sealed the deal on the handgun ban was that shortly after this, a member of a gun club forgot to make safe his shotgun and managed to kill himself while loading the gun into his car.

I actually got a shotgun license just after the UK handgun ban went into action and at the time, even the County Firearms Officer was having difficulty getting his firearm license renewed.

Now here's a fact that is known by many, but apparently not by all: criminals have a tendency to break the law. Gun crime in the UK has continued to rise. I'm not saying that this has happened as a direct result of the ban, I believe it happened in spite of it. I really don't think that stopping the legal ownership of handguns has had much of an impact, simply because most of the weapons used in gun crimes were not legally owned in the first place.

Now, the UK still has a lower incidence of gun crime than many other nations. I think a strong case can be made that the main reason for this is that our police officers do not carry firearms (well, for the most part).

In my opinion, attributing the rates of gun crime to private ownership is akin to blaming 9/11 on the aircraft industry. It's nothing more than an attempt to assign a single cause to a complex problem. Rather than arguing about the ownership of guns, people should instead be looking to combat the causes of criminal behaviour.

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(Source: Lockhart et al (2007) Gun and Knife Crime in Great Britain.)

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Criminals tend to choose guns because it is much easier to kill people with guns than with knives or stones. It also makes the kill impersonal. If there were no guns, I speculate that not many criminals will be too happy about having to use knives or stones to continue killing. In fact, they probably will not even go that route.

Rubbish. You can kill a lot more people with a knife than you can with a gun. Also, knives generally do not need to be reloaded and rarely run low on ammunition. Firearms replaced melee weapons because they offer a direct tactical advantage, not because people are squeamish.

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Source: knifecrimes.org (registered charity)

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