Posted on 06/04/2010 5:45:51 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
As the prime minister and home secretary meet people in Cumbria today there will be voices urging them to do something to ensure that the horrors of this week can never be visited on another community.
David Cameron has already warned against a knee-jerk response but there will be a review of our gun laws when the facts are known, the dust has settled and the scars have begun to heal.
Before ministers consider tightening what are already some of the toughest gun-ownership laws in the world, however, it might be worth seeking answers to two questions:
Is there a link between gun ownership and mass killings?
Would further restrictions on gun ownership be justified?
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All are profoundly shocking and tragic moments in our history. All must prompt us to look at how our government and our society can respond most effectively. But there is always a balance to be struck between reducing small risks and restricting vital freedoms.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Column two shows that the USA has experienced the greatest number with 24 cases, followed by China with 18 and Israel with 11. Given that Israel has a population of around 7.5 million compared with China's population of 1,300 million (see column three), it is clearly important to see such incidents in the context of the size of the country.
Column four provides a rough estimate of the relationship between population and mass killings - the number of incidents in the last half a century for every 10 million people.
The last column lists the number of legally held guns per 100 people. The main source for this is the Small Arms Survey [2.02MB PDF] compiled by the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies.
All the gun laws we’ve already enacted didn’t work so let’s make more gun laws that don’t work!
The second question, then, is whether the events in Cumbria justify further restrictions on gun ownership.
What the table shows is just how rare these kinds of incidents are. Britain has only experienced three in the last 50 years - possibly ever: Hungerford in 1987, Dunblane in 1996 and now Cumbria.
All are profoundly shocking and tragic moments in our history. All must prompt us to look at how our government and our society can respond most effectively. But there is always a balance to be struck between reducing small risks and restricting vital freedoms.
A point you don’t make is that Switzerland is NOT on the list. I assume that is because they’ve never had a “mass killing” despite a much higher legal gun presence (I don’t use overship, because a lot of the firearms are government-supplied militia weapons) than any other nation. But those military weapons are present in virtually every household, and are NOT secured from access.
Here is where the liberals now link gun ownership to mental disorders, allowing the medical community to do the dirty work for them.
I think they have had one.
They’ve recently had calls to change their long-standing firearms laws.
The list is of countries having more than one mass shooting.
Something your list fails to interpret and that is that the USA isn’t equal in gun laws and ownership across the country. Most mass killings in the US are in gun restrictive states, or “gun free zones” as the liberals like to call them.
Ah...I missed the point about "more than one".
There is a tendency to read the US number (90/100) as "90 out of every hundred Americans owns a gun", which is, on its face, absurd.
In an affluent society, most citizens who own a gun own more than one -- and those who are true afficianados or who have multiple uses for them may easily own ten (10) or more. Such certainly is the case in the region where I live.
So, if the average number of guns per gun owner is ten, (10) then only "Nine (9) out of every hundred Americans owns a gun".
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