Originally posted by ra
The easy answer to this problem is to pass stricter gun laws. If guns weren't so easily available to criminals there would be less gun crime. It's good that more police are getting guns though. Only the police and the army should be armed.
ra
I've got to ask...Are you serious here? Great Britain already has some of the strictest anti-gun laws around. The criminals referred to are carrying "illegal" guns (they ARE criminals after all, and by definition are acting outside the laws). Exactly what changes to the existing gun laws would you suggest to implement your "easy answer?" Washington D.C in the USA has some of the stictest gun laws in the US...and the highest violent crime rate in the country. One can argue that stricter gun laws does not equate automatically (or even usually) to lower violent crime.
Laws are a deterent only to the law-abiding. Now if you want to talk about harsher punishment for gun law violations, then you might have something worth discussing. Even then, it's all about convincing criminals that the cost of getting caught is greater than the potential benefit of violating those gun laws. Short of automatic death penalty (or maybe life-imprisonment) for using a gun to commit a crime, you'll always fail to convince the criminals...none of them ever expect to get caught anyway.
The gun-crime-law enforcement equation has a basic flaw that tends to favor the criminals. The criminals know law abiding citizens have no guns, and that the police do. Thus they have naught to fear from their potential victims if they themselves are armed. They simply learn how to avoid the police, either by working quickly or simply going to areas where police response times favor a successful criminal act and escape.
In regards to your last statement, every successful genocide in the last century has been preceded by disarming the population and leaving the police and military with the sole monopoly on violence. Those genocides were carried out either with the tacit approval of those state guardians, or worse, carried about by the very police and military that should have protected the victims.
