On 2/19/10, Drew <d...@rileyelf.free-online.co.uk> wrote: > > > Sitting on this little island on the east side of the Atlantic where hand > guns and semi-automatic weapons are completely banned (unless you are in the > military or police) and you can only own a target rifle or shotgun if you > can prove it is for a legitimate purpose, I find the concept of a > constitutional right to carry a device whose sole purpose is to kill seem > completely bonkers. The answer is a blanket ban, not a constitutional right > :-)
In 2006 there were about 50 homicides in Great Britain attributable to firearms. This is well after the hand gun ban. Your gun death rates have certainly gone down, to about 6% of total homicides. The overall homicide rate has gone up, however, which leads me to believe that murderers are stabbing and beating people to death. As a whole, though, GB's homicide rates are significantly lower than America's. The gun grabbers like to attribute this to gun control, but your homicide rates were lower than ours even before the ban. Canadian gun control, while liberal compared to GB's, is fairly restrictive compared to most of the US. Yet their violent crime rates are still higher than ours - in 2003 it was 963 per 100,000, vs. 475 per 100,000 in the US. Their 1995 Firearms Act has been a miserable failure and their government has gone back to blaming the US for their crime. We could discuss this all day, or even flame each other for weeks on end, and I doubt I'll change your mind. On the other hand, I've read the statistics from both sides of the argument and from where I sit gun control simply doesn't work for free people. -- Scott Loveless http://www.twosixteen.com/fivetoedsloth/ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
