Gman - finally getting back to you, 7 months later - LOL.
The amnesty went ahead, and 17,000 guns were netted, along with 403,000 rounds of ammunition.
Different governments view gun ownership in different ways. Americans are free to own guns, and many do so responsibly - but many are used in gangland and mafia hits. Some people argue that guns
prevent many crimes from happening, but the fact that a gun is needed to
prevent a crime suggests that guns are being used to
commit crimes. Some Americans argue for arming everyone as a deterrent against burglaries etc., and that might work up to a point.
But the British government's stance is based on the following facts:
- For a shooting to take place, a gun has to be present.
- The more guns present in a society, the more people are going to be killed by guns.
The second fact is borne out by the stats. Thousands in America killed each year by handguns alone, compared to fewer than 100 each year in Britain - the actual tally is usually around 60.
Some might say that it's not the guns' fault that so many people are killed - guns don't kill people, only people kill people - and all that crap. They might then seek to shift the blame for the stats away from the guns themselves, and on to certain ethnic and socio-economic groups (read poor black ghettos where gangs and drugs are rife). Thing is, we too have poor black ghettos where gangs and drugs are rife - but we don't have thousands of gun murders each year. No guns = no shootings. Of course there are
some guns, which is why we have
some shootings...
...but we do not have the bloodbath that America has, with 300,000 people killed by firearms in the last 25 years. We WOULD have something like that if we had a free-for-all policy on guns. OK, so many of those shootings would be between rival gangs. The fact is that we've already got more than enough crime. The British public does not want to read about gun murders by the thousands year after year. 60 each year is bad enough.
