Gun Laws Around The World: Do They Work?
by ArrogantlyBluntApril 26th, 2009 at 2:56 PM
Filed under: Politics, Science & Technology
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"I have a question. Why is it only in America (compared to the rest of the first world) that guns are so important? honestly, it seems like the people in other countries, France, Britain,Japan, don't have all these problems that the U.S.has. So what? is the rest of the Western World, Japan, and Australia so much better than we are or are they more enlightened? Tell me what place Guns have in our society todday, who are we afraid of? I'm not knockingyour thoughts or anyhting, I'm just courious to know what makes Gun proponets tick." Here is the answer. I hope it helps you. It sure opened my eyes. Gun Laws Around The World: Do They Work? By Don B. Kates Peaceful societies do not need general gun bans, and violent societies do not benefit from them. Take a look at the facts the gun-grabbers don`t want you to know. Americans have been gravely misled about foreign gun ownership and the severity and effectiveness of foreign gun bans. It simply is not true to state that "the U.S. has more gun availability and far less restriction than any other modern industrial nation." That honor goes to Israel where, nevertheless, murder "rates are much lower than in the United States despite ... [Israel’s] greater availability of guns to law-abiding civilians," writes Israeli judge Abraham Tennenbaum (formerly an official with the Israeli National Police and then a professor of criminology). Europe Equally erroneous is the impression that Europe is uniformly anti-gun. Laws vary. Luxembourg totally bans all guns from civilian ownership. France, Belgium and Germany allow citizens to own handguns but these countries are more restrictive than most U.S. states. In Austria, every law-abiding citizen has a legal right to buy handguns, and roughly ten per cent of Austrians have done so (compared to 16 per cent of U.S. citizens). Switzerland And then there is Switzerland, where the laws are similar to those in Israel and gun availability is comparable to that in the U.S. In Switzerland, handgun licenses are available to any law-abiding applicant. In half the Swiss cantons (similar to U.S. states), licensees are free to carry their personal handguns concealed. Beyond this freedom of ownership, every law-abiding military-age Swiss male is issued a firearm and he must keep it at home to perform his mandatory militia obligation. Switzerland`s enlisted men are required to keep at home the STGW 90 assault rifle ("Sturmgewehr"), which fires both full- or semi-auto. Retired militiamen may buy their issued firearms. Below: The Walther P-38, one of several pistols that the Israeli government furnishes to its citizens, including teenagers. For the 263,000 officers and non-commissioned officers, the issued firearm is a 9 mm Parabellum semi-automatic pistol, either the SIG-Sauer P210 or its successor, the SIG-Sauer P220. For the millions of enlisted men, the issued firearm is an assault rifle: the STGW 90. The STGW 90 is a version of the SIG-Sauer 550 semi-automatic rifle that is select-fire, meaning it may be fired in either full- or semi-auto mode. When he retires, any Swiss militiaman who wishes to buy his issued firearm may do so. Homicides in Europe Homicide rates are quite low in all the nations mentioned above. However, the homicide rate in handgun-banning Luxembourg is much higher than in the others: 2.1 per 100,000 population, versus 1.2 and 1.1 per 100,000 for "handgun-ridden" Israel and Switzerland--which have the lowest homicide rates of all. (The accompanying table provides the references for homicide and suicide rate comparisons discussed in this article.) Western Europe, in fact, has always had very low homicide rates as compared to the U.S. This is not something caused by strict anti-gun laws, because this low homicide rate existed before such laws were adopted, and the low rate occurs also in Switzerland and Austria which have no such strict anti-gun laws. European anti-gun laws only arrived after World War I, and they were not passed in order to curb crime. They were passed in response to the political violence of that tumultuous era (1918-1939) between the two World Wars. Whatever their purpose, European anti-gun laws have miserably failed. They have not prevented assassination, terrorism, and other political violence--problems occurring throughout Europe on a fairly regular basis, but not so in the U.S. Neither have these anti-gun laws stopped non-political crime, which has steadily increased throughout Europe since World War II. To this issue, the further question has been asked, "Why has Europe had so much less non-political violent crime than the U.S.?" Yale University`s preeminent historian, Dr. C. Vann Woodward, suggests an answer. He writes, "The impact upon Europe of the emigration [to the U.S.] of 35,000,000 Europeans in the Century between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I remains to be acknowledged. The importance of the West as a safety valve for American society has undoubtedly been exaggerated. But the significance of America as a safety valve for Europe and the effect of the closing of that safety valve after World War I remain to be fully assessed." 1 Suicides in Europe Nor, finally, have these anti-gun laws stopped suicide, something which has always been a much greater problem in Europe than in the U.S. In this respect, one can note a curious (but invariable) omission when anti-gun articles compare the U.S. to Europe.2 Anti-gun propaganda emphasizes suicide as well as homicide. U.S. suicide rates have risen over the past quarter century (while U.S. homicide rates have declined). However, anti-gun advocates recently have taken to combining suicide and homicide figures in the U.S. This allows them to conceal the decline in U.S. homicide rates (and to exaggerate the so-called "societal costs" of gun ownership). They have done this more particularly in the last few years while the U.S. homicide rate has been declining (despite a 100 per cent increase in handgun ownership since the 1970s). But then, inconsistently, when comparing the U.S. to Europe, they only compare the homicide rates. They never use the combined homicide-suicide figure--because it would refute their entire argument; it shows that Europe`s homicide-suicide combined rates are higher than that of the U.S. INTERNATIONAL SUICIDE/HOMICIDE TABLE* (*Ranked according to highest combined suicide-murder rate; nations ranked higher than the U.S. in either suicide or murder rates are in bold face) Country Year Suicide Murder Combined ESTONIA 1995 39.99 22.11 62.1 RUSSIA 1992 26.6 15.3 41.9 LATVIA 1990 26. 9.2 35.2 LITHUANIA 1990 26. 7.5 33.5 FINLAND 1994-5 27.3 3.3 30.6 UKRAINE 1990 20.6 8.0 28.6 DENMARK 1991 22. 5.0 27.0 AUSTRIA 1991 22.3 1.5 23.8 SWITZERLAND* 1994-5 20.8 1.1 21.9 FRANCE 1990 20.2 1.1 21.3 BELGIUM 1987 19.3 1.4 20.7 United States* 1995-6 11.5 7.3 18.8 SWEDEN 1990 17.2 1.3 18.5 GERMANY 1995 15.8 1.8 17.6 LUXEMBOURG 1991 15.1 2.1 17.2 NEW ZEALAND 1989 13.9 1.9 15.8 CANADA 1995 12.9 2.0 14.9 ISRAEL 1989 7.3 1.2 8.5 *All information in this table dated before 1993 comes from the U.N. Demographic Yearbooks for 1993 and 1992. All information dated 1993 and thereafter comes from a draft study prepared for the U.N. Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice`s Vienna Session 28 April-9 May, 1997, except: a) the U.S. homicide figure comes from FBI preliminary data for 1996, and b) the Swiss homicide and suicide rates come from the Swiss national police. Combined Homicide-Suicide Look to the accompanying table for the result obtained when the anti-gun forces` combined homicide-suicide approach is applied to the international figures: The U.S. combined homicide-suicide rate falls in the middle of the nations, and is lower than eight European nations. Even compared to the nations with lower combined rates, the U.S. rate is only slightly higher. Of the 18 nations shown in the table, the U.S. ranks in the middle as to murder and suicide combined. The lowest rate of all is for Israel, the nation where guns are the most available and supplied to citizens, including teenagers. My point is not that gun availability reduces suicide, or even murder. Statistics show that the relatively crime-free nations don`t appear to need or benefit from severe anti-gun laws. Western Europe The table clearly shows that, regardless of their gun laws, Western European nations have roughly comparable rates of both murder and suicide. This cannot plausibly be attributed to severe handgun restrictions because the highest murder rates among these nations are in the nations with the most restrictive gun laws (Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany). In those restrictive nations, the average murder rate of 2.73 per 100,000 population is over twice as high as the 1.26 average rate of Switzerland, Israel and Austria, where gun laws are least restrictive). Russia and the Baltic Countries Even less do gun control laws benefit high crime nations like Russia and its former possessions, the countries of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine. When these and other countries were under the control of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the central Soviet government totally banned civilian handgun ownership. The Soviet government uniquely implemented the ban by creating after World War II a unique caliber cartridge for Soviet handguns (9 x 18 mm). This cartridge is too short to interchange with handguns using the familiar European standard 9 x 19 cartridge (9 mm Parabellum, or 9 mm Luger, as Americans commonly call it); it`s too long to interchange with handguns shooting the .380 cartridge. This meant that anyone smuggling foreign handguns into the USSR (for example, soldiers returning from foreign wars) would find ammunition unavailable.3 Nevertheless, though exact statistics were never released, analysis clearly indicates that Soviet homicide rates far exceeded those in the U.S. 4 With the USSR no longer in existence, the homicide rates in the former Soviet republics and Russia continue to exceed those in the U.S., as shown in the accompanying table. Under the Soviet regime, with strict gun control, the weapons used for homicides were largely knives, clubs, and other non firearms. Today, though handguns remain virtually unavailable to ordinary Russian citizens, homicide rates remain high, being committed by those criminals in Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc., who seem to have no difficulty acquiring both Russian and foreign-made handguns and suitable ammunition. Violence in Any Society Such international statistics show the pointlessness of gun bans. In any society, truly violent people are only a small minority. We know that law abiding citizens do not commit violent crimes. We also know that criminals will neither obey gun bans nor refrain from turning other deadly instruments to their nefarious purposes. It is obvious and well-proven that the amount of violence in any particular society is determined not by the mere availability of any particular form of weapon, but by cultural, socio-economic and institutional factors that produce people willing to engage in extreme violence.5 How much violence occurs in any given society will depend on the proportionate size of truly violent people. In sum, peaceful societies do not need general gun bans and violent societies do not benefit from them. Don B. Kates is a San Francisco-based criminologist, professor, and constitutional lawyer. Among his many published works is, The Great American Gun Debate: Essays in Firearms and Violence (Pacific Research Institute, 1997), by Don B. Kates and Professor Gary Kleck of the Florida State School of Criminology (available for $17 plus $3 for postage and handling, and 8.5% tax for California residents, from the Pacific Research Institute, 755 Sansome St., San Francisco, CA 94111; telephone (415) 989-0833). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in The American Guardian, October, 1997. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: 6/11/2001 12:00:00 AM |
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Have we reached our goal?
Safety is the "goal". Are we safe yet?
When is the debt from September 11 going to be paid off?
'Debt', I cannot answer that. It would be better to ask the families of Christine Lee Hanson age 2 years, David Reed Gamboa Brandhorst age 3 years, Dana & Zoe Falkenberg age 3 and 8 years, Juliana Valentine McCourt age 4 years, Asia Cottom, Rodney Dickens, and Bernard Curtis Brown, II all aged 11 years. They will never have the chance to grow one day older. They will never have the chance for a rich old life. They are gone because of hate. They are gone because of MURDER. Ask the families of all the murdered on 9-11, all the families of the 3,000. And ask the families of those that have died before and after. I cannot answer for them. I fought in the war of my youth. I am to old to fight in this one. I would if they would take me. The war is not about pay back. Are we safe yet from the mass murders? I do not believe so. Do you think we are safe here?
Thank you AB. Those tears did roll. I am not good when it comes to seeing people hurt. I was in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC several times and I tell you what I saw was not something to brag about. If it's not gun related it's bombings etc. The men and women who go in the military whole come out with missing limbs. If not one missing limb then two or more. Those that do come out before their time, come in a box. So I ask, with this new war, how many more lives? When is the debt from September 11 going to be paid off? Is it America who invested the most bodies? If we add the numbers from 9/11 and the Iraq war how many is that? Have we reached our goal? Thanks and I hope you don't mind. I am not attacking anyone here but the leaders of our country. If by chance that the President of this country happens by and reads this, think about it Mr. President. Thanks again, julita
Hi Julita,
I am truly sorry for your loss. Nothing any one can say, or do, will ever relieve you of this pain. At times what some one says will make the pain worse. At times what they say will make you mad. At times what is said will comfort you. Any one who has lost a loved one knows this, feels this, and no matter what some one does, says, acts upon, they are not trying to hurt you, only help. The pain of loss will get weaker and weaker. The tears will fall when you think about him; but, you will be able to remember more and more, with each passing week, the good times you and he had together. My God smile upon you and hold you in His loving arms, AB
Hello Ryan29,
It does appear that you and I are not very much alike, you stated that:You think that if someone raped my daughter, wife, mother, I'd allow the cops to handle it? I d kill the bastard with my bare hands if I had to. Also, you two seem like you both actually want to use your guns, like your waiting for someone to rob you so you can blow their head off.
Ryan29
I for one never said I would use that weapon to kill any one.
You may think that the only use for a gun is death, but that is not the case. Most police offices never pull their weapons nor do they fire them at a person, they fire only on the firing range. I myself have never pointed my weapons at any human being. In the worst case I would protect and serve my family. The word here is protect. I would protect my family, not kill some one for fun.
You have also stated:The United States has a huge popluation, I believe it's the third largest in the world? (not sure 100%) so that would mean that though the rates is lower there is still more sucides murders happening here then elsewhere, correct?
Ryan29
But these are the facts:
"Suicides in Europe
Nor, finally, have these anti-gun laws stopped suicide, something which has always been a much greater problem in Europe than in the U.S. In this respect, one can note a curious (but invariable) omission when anti-gun articles compare the U.S. to Europe.2"
"The U.S. combined homicide-suicide rate falls in the middle of the nations, and is lower than eight European nations. Even compared to the nations with lower combined rates, the U.S. rate is only slightly higher." "rates per 100,000 population"
Also you said:
To me, you both are sick twisted people and personally, I think your what's wrong with this country. Ignorant red necks mostly from the south who walk around with your heads up your asses peace and love!
Ryan29
Ryan, I never said I wanted to kill any one, so who is the "sick twisted" person? I d kill the bastard with my bare hands if I had to.
Ryan29
Also, Ryan, "Red Neck" is a term used to describe a working man, one who works out in the sun, therefore they have red necks. Is it that you are against farmers, carpenters, ranches, ship builders, etc? Are you against the working man?
Furthermore, Ryan, I am not from the South. I moved done here. I am from the same place that Mr. Bear.rock Who.sain Oh.bomb.ah II, "Juniors" people are from.
Ryan, you really need to control your anger and hate, it makes you look like a person that is capable of murder, or violence against others. In a court of law, what you write in here could be used to swing a jury against you.
May the peace and love of God the Almighty protect and save you, in the name of Jesus, His Son, Amen
Such a wide area of discussion with guns but I'll critique in the subject of SUICIDE where the tool GUN is concerned. True story on my part. Have you all ever been in the presence of a man in his death bed? Not a site for most people but, I had to stay till the end of this man's life. He was my brother...My brother probably had several guns in his healthier days. He had brain cancer. Imagine the days following. The unbearable pain, when he would talk we couldn't understand what he was trying to say and he would get pissed at that. Going in and out of his room things were rapidly changing. The moaning, the anger, the frustration, etc. One day I walked in and found that he had removed the feeding tube out of his nose. Calling for assistance, nurses come and put it right back in. That day it got so bad that he raised his left hand and made the figure of a gun and his eyes glimmering with tears. I figured that if he had his way he would have ended his life. It was at this action that the doctors finally heard his plea. They granted him his request to die without anymore treatments. Morphine through IV. He died a few days later. I know this story is not directly a kill with a gun but, it was because of him that I fear it. Who knows maybe one day I'll face that fear. Thanks for your time
Every year I put a hurricane kit together but I don’t want to be hit by one.
I’m sorry I forgot you use to like outside of New Orleans and you might not understand the hurricane preparedness analogy.
Also, you two seem like you both actually want to use your guns, like your waiting for someone to rob you so you can blow their head off.
No I’m not waiting but I do believe in being prepared. It’s just an insurance policy of sorts. Every year I put a hurricane kit together but I don’t want to be hit by one.
Ignorant red necks mostly from the south who walk around with your heads up your asses peace and love!
Actually I grew up outside of Philly, I just currently reside in the south.
There was one thing I forgot to mention about your stats. The United States has a huge popluation, I believe it's the third largest in the world? (not sure 100%) so that would mean that though the rates is lower there is still more sucides murders happening here then elsewhere, correct? Also, you and Navy Rob here are wrong. You think that id sdomeone raped my daughter, wife, mother, I'd allow the cops to handle it? I d kill the bastard with my bare hands if I had to. Also, you two seem like you both actually want to use your guns, like your waiting for someone to rob you so you can blow their head off. To me, you both are sick twisted people and personally, I think your what's wrong with this country. Ignorant red necks mostly from the south who walk around with your heads up your asses peace and love!
I like your article to.
Photographs
International Suicide/Homicide Table
A shooting festival in Switzerland, with young folks carrying their STGW 90 5.6mm assault rifles.
Switzerland`s enlisted men are required to keep at home the STGW 90 assault rifle ("Sturmgewehr"), which fires both full- or semi-auto. Retired militiamen may buy their issued firearms.
The Walther P-38, one of several pistols that the Israeli government furnishes to its citizens, including teenagers.
I would like to take this time to tell of such honors that the men and women of all armed forces in what they have done to make this country a safe place. They/you must know that this time of our lives we owe gratitude. julita