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Originally Posted by Deus Ex  That's what happened in the Uk when that maniac went mental in a school in Hungerford.
He killed something like sixteen kids & the response was to ban handguns.
Now only villans have them. |
This is the amnesty I was referring to. Basically it achieved next to nothing. It was illegal to own guns before Hungerford anyway and the idea of the amnesty was to give people with illegal guns the chance to dispose of them. Hungerford changed nothing in the UK.
In the UK the minority of criminals are armed, and even most house burglars do not carry arms. It is not uncommon for home owners to confront burglars and live to tell the tale. In the US if you confront a burglar you die. In fact if you have an argument with a neighbour about his pet cat pissing on your lawn you could die. You just have to be really careful that you don't upset someone's delicate sensibilities.
It is a simple fact that in the USA you are ten times more likely to be shot for some trivial reason that in the UK. If you are prepared to risk being shot over a domestic argument then that's fine.
Another factor in all of this, however, is capital punishment. The more a criminal has to lose then the more he is prepared to risk in order to escape conviction. All you achieve by having a death sentence is to ensure that people who have killed have nothing to lose and will kill again in the hope of avoiding the death sentence. Similarly if the sentence for, say, rape, is ten years imprisonment then a high proportion of victims live. If the sentence is death then rape victims die. The combination of widespread gun ownership coupled with capital punishment is the reason why so many people die in the USA.