Don't worry, Creamo. I could tell this thread was almost done when I read
Originally posted by lazs2
so.... you have given up your freedoms for nothing... for womanly fear.
Well Lazs, allow me to take a step back a moment...
See when I came to the US in 1979 to live and work, I knew that there were a lot of privately owned guns. I thought just about everyone might carry one, and wondered if I would need to buy my own. When I got there, I half expected the guys in my department to be wearing holstered guns under their jackets/suitcoats. I quickly realised that was not the case.
No-one I ever worked with came to work with a gun, and there was no discussion of guns at work. Shortly afterwards in 1980, a gun related atrocity had occurred in Chicago not far from where I was working. It might have been the Cabrini Green housing project - too long ago to remember the details. But I remember an article appearing in the Chicago Tribune, quoting the gun related homicide stats for the major countries in Europe. The values were all single or double digit values. And then there was the American stat - 10,000+. And I thought
"so much for guns making the place safer" Then Mike Royko in the Tribune began a series of articles which ran and ran - one a day - in which he argued the case against guns.
I came back to England in 1982, and walked into a new crisis - the US placement of Cruise missiles at USAF Greenham Common. The protesters there were all women, or wimmin as they preferred to be known. They must have been playing up to your sterotype - lol. Those wimmin and the Labour Party wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons unilaterally - that is, get rid of them regardless of whether Russia got rid of theirs. I was against that and, fortunately for all mankind, so were Thatcher and Reagan. Later of course we had multilateral disarmament brought about by the "peace dividend", and several American air force bases, including USAF Greenham Common, have since closed because they were no longer needed. The "peace wimmin" remained; well, they were all dykes, and probably liked each other's company...
So just now, when I looked for some material from Royko, I found this.
"Finally, I noticed something else. Strict gun laws are about as effective as strict drug laws. The drugs flow and so does the supply of weapons. It pains me to say this, but the NRA seems to be right: The cities and states that have the toughest gun laws have the most murder and mayhem. Just as junkies find drugs, criminals find weapons. And I haven't the faintest idea how to prevent it. And we've now reached the point where most law-abiding gun owners believe that they need their guns because of all the artillery that is in the hands of the loonies. They are against unilateral disarmament."
The key is in the last two sentences. The loonies are armed to the teeth, and you guys don't want unilateral disarmament....
... and I don't blame you. That's why I have NEVER said on this BBS that law abiding people in America should be made to give up their guns. But what I
have done (on many occasions!) is to point out the cost in terms of human lives of a policy which allows an unlimited supply of handguns and other deadly weapons to get into the hands of the bad guys.
My Californian friend, CPP, lives in a remote area near Oxnard and has a pistol. He hates the thing. He hates even more the fact that circumstances conspired to persuade him to get one. There's only one reason you guys need a gun - to defend yourself from a bad guy who
also has a gun. What we have done in Europe/NZ/Japan etc. is to strive for the scenario whereby even the bad guys don't have guns. That way, the good guys won't need them either. It's a strategy that has worked, even if it hasn't worked perfectly.
So your attempts to glorify gun ownership to the rest of the world are going to fall on deaf ears, I'm afraid. You probably have a lot of guys here who support your stance, just as I have a lot of guys who support mine.
The problem for the US is, and always will be, that there are so many guns in circulation now that attempts to rectify this will leave guns in criminal hands only.
Far from viewing American gun ownership rights as something we envy, most of us outside the US can see that private gun ownership is something you are saddled with, and for which you will go on paying a cost of thousands of lives every year.
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- America’s constitutional right to bear arms is an anachronism dating back to the 18th century. In modern times, it is an unmitigated disaster which has given rise to many millions of privately owned guns and an alarming homicide rate, with a tally of more than 300,000 firearms related homicides in the past 25 years. While no law can be 100% effective, Britain has no “gun culture”, and much stricter firearms controls which have contained the annual tally of gun related homicides to a double digit value - fewer than one fiftieth of the American gun-related homicide rate per 100,000 population.[/color]
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