Gun Control Isn’t Crime Control by John Stossel.
Read the whole thing but here are a couple of highlights:
After the 1997 shooting of 16 kids in Dunblane, England, the United Kingdom passed one of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, banning its citizens from owning almost all types of handguns. Britain seemed to get safer by the minute, as 162,000 newly-illegal firearms were forked over to British officials by law-abiding citizens.
But this didn’t decrease the amount of gun-related crime in the U.K. In fact, gun-related crime has nearly doubled in the U.K. since the ban was enacted.
Might stricter gun laws result in more gun crime? It seems counterintuitive but makes sense if we consider one simple fact: Criminals don’t obey the law. Strict gun laws, like the ban in Britain, probably only affect the actions of people who wouldn’t commit crimes in the first place.
…
In January 2006, a bill was proposed in the Virginia State Assembly that would have forced Virginia Tech to change its current policy and allow students and faculty members to legally carry weapons on campus. Teenage college students carrying guns makes me nervous, but shouldn’t adults be able to decide if they want to arm themselves — just in case? When the bill was defeated, a Virginia Tech spokesman cheered the action, saying, “This will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”
However, one gun rights advocate lamented the bill’s failure with chilling accuracy: “You never know when evil will pop up.”
Back in 2002, evil arrived at Virginia’s Appalachian School of Law. A disgruntled student opened fire on the school’s campus, killing three and wounding more. The law school also prohibited guns on campus, but fortunately two students happened to have firearms in their cars. When the pair heard gunshots, they retrieved their weapons and trained them on the killer, helping restrain him until authorities arrived.
I’ll add to John’s argument here by reminding readers that, so far, there have been no accidental deaths or crimes of anger at University of Utah.
Of course criminals will always be able to get guns if they want them. Similarly they can get cocaine into the country if they want to. They can break into your house if they want to.
So should we sell cocaine from the local newsagent, and leave our doors wide open when we go on holiday? Of course not. Gun crime in the UK was going to rise with or without stricter gun crime laws. But Seung-Hui Cho would never have been able to get hold of guns with anything like the same ease in the UK – and surely that is a good thing.
We really have to ask where do these criminals come from, because they are not born with a desire to perpetuate a gun massacre. Surely one of the first places to look for the cause of these impulses is in the culture – a culture that thinks police should routinely carry guns, that private individuals should carry a handgun in their bag in case of muggers, etc.
See this BBC article for some interesting stats.
This is probably too nitpicky, but it just bothers me that Stossel doesn’t know that Dunblane is in Scotland, not England. Governmentally it’s the same, but it was such big news at the time that a journalist ought to know that one.
Still, that doesn’t take away from his point.
The basis of your argument says to me “cocaine and guns are the same”. These are two different issues. On what basis would you enact these laws? Is the murder rate in the UK now lower than it was in the 1500’s? People still fought horrible wars full of murder and torture without firearms. We’re going to have to make an awful lot of items illegal if we want to be safe.
AND…
Criminals, like everybody else, are born with the seeds of destruction – the natural tendency to hate God and neighbor. Not everyone realizes these tendencies to an extreme, thank God for that. But these tendencies are not cultivated by a society that enables the police force to use the power of the sword or recognizes the right of its citezens to bear arms. These things are cultivated by a society that encourages a culture of death, and loves it.
My apologies, I was referring to Dave K’s post, “pentamom” must have posted while I was hunting and pecking…