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Gun Control Misfires in Europe
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Gun Control Misfires in Europe
JOHN R. LOTT JR.
Why Do They Want Us Disarmed?
Alice Felt - Walla Walla, Wash.
Regardless of the research, which admittedly is needed to make the argument convincing, it just makes so much sense that arming citizens will deter and reduce crime. We unfortunately live in a world with criminals. That's a fact everyone should be able to agree on. Criminals likely will have no problem violating any gun-control laws. They will have access to guns and will use them. This we all know. It just makes sense that in such a world, law-abiding citizens should be able to have access to guns to not only defend themselves but to also act as a deterrent. Why this isn't clear to the great minds that keep pushing gun-control is a mystery, unless they have other motives for wanting an unarmed populace. I can only imagine what that might be.
The Real Problem Is Shame Control
Roy Fassel - Los Angeles
I was telling a friend the other day when the story came out about the German shooting, that "If I had one dollar left in this whole world, I would bet it all on a sure thing. The Wall Street Journal would have a editorial column about the need for guns and the limitations of gun controls." I would have doubled my net worth on this bet.
You are missing one very important part of the German student story. A teach went up to the shooting killer student, totally unarmed, and told the student that he (the teacher) would not fight, but wanted the student to look him (the teacher) in the eye as he (the killer student) killed him. The student laid down the gun and said, "No. That is enough killing for one day." I have one question. Only one. In this scenario, does anyone think the student would not have shot an armed teacher?
No question. Gun controls do not slow down shootings. No question. Having everyone armed won't either. Only shame can do it. Guns eliminate shame.
Check Out His Work
Mary Rosh - Philadelphia
Mr. Lott's work is impressive. For those who question it, they should take a few minutes to look at one of his studies. His work on multiple victim shootings can be found at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=272929.
Crime rates vary across countries for a lot of different reasons, but what is interesting is how the rates increase when law-abiding citizens are disarmed.
Lock Up the Criminals
Keith Russell - Spring, Texas
The reality is that both sides are wrong. Guns or lack thereof has less to do with safety than having criminals running loose. The real solution is that once someone has been determined to be a violent criminal they need to be excluded from society (placed in prison).
'Drink for Success'
Theodore Stanford - Las Cruces, N.M.
A comparison between the two studies on today's OpinionJournal pages is in order. Christopher Auld finds a correlation between drinking and income, and mentions that he is not the first to notice this. Yet he cautions us against drawing any of the obvious conclusions, and rightly so. Without more information, it is impossible to know whether alcohol stimulates productivity, or excess income encourages alcoholism, or whether there is some other mechanism going on in which the two are only tangentially related.
On the other hand, John Lott cites a few selected statistics on guns and crime, and expects us to assume that they support the idea that gun control is counterproductive. The article doesn't come close to making a compelling case. The high-profile public massacres that he mentions are a tiny fraction of all homicides, and are (fortunately) not frequent enough here or in Europe to form an accurate statistical picture. Also, there are several plausible explanations for why gun violence has increased in Britain and Australia since the gun laws were tightened. For example, violence may have already been on an upward trend for other reasons, and in fact this may have been why more restrictive gun laws were passed. It is impossible to know, without further evidence, what effect the new laws had on the crime trends already playing out.
The sort of statistical "evidence" displayed in Lott's article can be easily marshaled by almost anyone trying to "prove" almost anything. If Auld took the same attitude as Lott, he would be writing a book called "Drink for Success."
We Check Guns More Carefully Than People
Paul Wilson - Syracuse, N.Y.
It is ironic that an instant background check can be made on a U.S. citizen for the purchase of a handgun while a foreign visitor has little or no background check to enter our country. He can sign a few papers and disappear into the population. Hey, we can at least be sure he is not legally carrying a gun from his foreign land. Makes sense to me.
Logic Shows Why Gun Control Doesn't Work
Abraham Hudgins - Eva, Ala.
This article is absolutely correct. It only takes a small amount of logical reasoning to come to the answer to crime control. It will never come from gun control (criminals love gun-control laws). It will come only from criminal control, and since police can not be everywhere at once (even though they do try, and I appreciate that) it is up to the citizens most of the time to protect themselves and those around them until the cops get there.
The logic flows like this: If you pass a gun law, the law-abiding citizens (those you are not worried about) will obey it by definition. Also by definition, the criminals (those you are worried about) will ignore it. Therefore by passing the gun law, you have disarmed the victim you say you are trying to protect and empowered the predator because he now knows that he is the only one who will have a gun in any confrontation. It also follows that if there was a universal right to carry a concealed weapon for law-abiding citizens (criminals already do this remember), the criminal would not know whom he could safely rob and who might blow his head off.
Being the usual cowardly bullies they are, criminals would seek safer hunting grounds like maybe England or Australia. Result: Crime drops here, crime rises there until they learn the same lesson in logic that we must.
Gun Controllers Can't Control Themselves
Charles Mitchell - Winchester, Ohio
Why is it that seemingly intelligent people can't grasp the simple fact that an armed citizenry is the single best guarantee of freedom for all citizens? Could it be that their real purpose in denying the obvious is to ensure the loss of freedom for most citizens? Of course they don't include themselves among the losers because they have designs on being the winners, or rulers of a weaponless society. For every instance these antigun nuts can cite in which guns were used to commit crimes, I can cite 10 in which law-abiding citizens used guns to prevent crimes and save the lives of themselves and others.
Of course the gun grabbers don't practice what they preach in most cases, as witnessed by observing their actions as opposed to their rhetoric. The late columnist Carl Rowan, an avowed gun banner who used his column almost daily to advocate the banning of guns used a (gasp) gun to shoot teenagers for the heinous crime of jumping his fence and swimming in his private pool. And who could forget that paragon of honesty Rosie O'Donnell who attacked Tom Selleck on her show for being a gun owner while employing a gun toting body guard and admitting to buying a rifle for a close relative? So the proof is there. They are quite sure their lives and property are more important than the lives and property of the masses. We are fast being the serfs of the lords.
Rumors That Deter
John Averyt - New York
An armed and dangerous citizenry, or the rumor of one, is indeed enough to send criminals packing to other, safer environs. Also, as demonstrated recently in California, an armed policeman parked outside a school, or an armed pilot inside the cockpit, I might add.
What a Treasure
Jerry Dunn - Greenville, S.C.
John Lott is a national treasure. His in-depth analysis and meticulous studies of the impacts of guns laws generated by the myriad of formulations of liberal "feel good" policies relentless destroys any rational basis for support of most existing as well as any basis for new gun control laws. And yet liberals persist in advancing new and different "schemes" for abridging the right to bear arms, all without foundation or valid justification, relying instead upon the same failed inane, emotionally derived poppycock.
And less some attempt to dismiss him out of hand as some type of right-wing kook, which is after all the typical liberal response when faced with arguments and facts they cannot refute, years ago I stumbled upon a C-Span 2 weekend book-review program in which Mr. Lott, then a member of staff of the University of Chicago School of Law, and more recently at Yale, was reviewing his initial book. He quietly and meticulously outlined the methodology he used and presented the data and graphs he developed, which exposed the failure of gun control laws to reduce "gun crime." His presentation made clear that he began his research with no preconceptions, merely a desire to determine the effects of the some 20,000-plus gun laws in achieving their stated objectives and in reducing violent crime. He used the diversity of laws within the several states as a basis for tracking impacts of new gun-control laws.
Notably, this was a virgin field, virtually no comprehensive statistically based studies had been conducted, despite the then 50 or more years of state, local and federal legislation regarding gun controls! That's right, multiple decades of laws enacted without any real analytic effort made to exam the impacts to assure that the promised "benefits," real or imagined had been achieved! He stated then that he was surprised when his research showed that the impact of more severe gun control laws was to increase rather than decrease violent crime, including gun crime, precisely as his current article reveals in the case of Europe! How about that for a typical liberal feel-good average, zero for 20,000!
The New World Leads
Martin Heilweil - New York
I think that the Europeans' complaint that they are becoming more like America is a more inclusive complaint than the rise of gun crime (and nongun crime), and draws its animus from the failure of their cultures to compete successfully with ours. Hearts and minds, you know.
That having been said, the Europeans have not followed the U.S. further, (i) into the sterile debate into "root causes," which led us into 30 years, the 1960s to 1990s, of failed attempts to stop crime by "improving" society (e.g., "why do the French immigrant Arabs hate France so much, it has been so good to them"), and (ii) into the productive "lock 'em up" approach (1990s to 2000s), under which perhaps 0.5% to 1% of all Americans are in prison, and as much as one third of some demographic groups are under some form of criminal justice supervision, which has led to the to two-thirds or three-fourths decline in crime rates.
The New World still leads the Old.
(Hint: The U.S. has the death penalty, at least nominally)
If You Like Guns So Much, Go to Yemen
Bryan N. Georgiady - Kernersville, N.C.
Mr. Lott is playing his figures like a Stradivarius violin. The massive gun crime increases he cites in Britain, Australia and elsewhere are all in percentages. Show us the real numbers.
For one example, he stated that, "since the [British] ban, gun crimes have risen by an astounding 40%." True, but the actual number is still only around 7,000. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, gun crimes in America numbered around 533,000 in 2000. Population-adjusted, the average American is still 16 times as likely to face an armed offender as a British person.
And although assault and burglary are still only slightly higher in Britain, the murder rate--also adjusted to population--is roughly 600% higher in America than in Britain (approximately 1.3 per 100,000 residents vs. 7.8). Here, 60% to 70% of all murders (around 8,000 per year) are facilitated by firearms. How many of those began as simple robberies?
I'd feel safer in Britain than in America any day. I would also encourage all "guns for safety" proponents like Mr. Lott to spend an extended period of time in a firearm-friendly locale like Yemen, or perhaps Afghanistan.
Studying the Studies
Thomas Dillard - Escazu, Costa Rica
This is turning out to be a great night for studying studies. I am glad that we are consumers of the products from countries that prohibit the sale and use of their guns at home, and not the other way around.
The other surprise is the loving care that is placed on the finish of guns that come from these countries; real works of art. Belgian Brownings and British doubles are suitable as museum pieces, while guns manufactured in the U.S. when we still made them were mundane and repeaters could be bought in most towns for as little as $12. And they got used for protection, but more often for meat.
Obviously, the forbidden fruit is always the most desirable, and to a troubled person without power, a gun seems the best way to secure it. The prettier, the better. But something else is happening. In Oregon, where I grew up, many of us received 22 "single shots" (Winchesters were $5.95) for Christmas in the fifth or sixth grade. No big deal. But a while ago in Springfield, just 75 miles away, a crazed gun worshipping boy of 16, killed his loving parents first, then went to work in the school cafeteria on his schoolmates, until a number were killed and wounded before a couple of heroic students subdued him. Both of these came from families of ardent hunters. All of this in Oregon, a state of great social rest?
Before any problem is solved, the problem must be defined first, and it hasn't happened in Oregon, the rest of the U.S., or on any of the other continents. Any suggestions?
The Left's Evolution
Duane Speight - Prosperity, S.C.
When the more militant elements of the American left declared an armed rebellion against the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s, their primary targets were policemen. These "revolutionaries" converted the old slogan of the NRA, "If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns," into "If guns are outlawed only cops will have guns."
At the time, they wanted to be able to arm themselves to kill the government's "pigs." Now these antiquated dope-damaged Maoists and their liberal ilk "are" the government. Needless to say, their point of view toward gun control has evolved to incorporate both slogans but in a twisted kind of way--namely that it is now quite acceptable for cops "and" outlaws to be armed.
For the first protects their power and the latter doesn't threaten it and sometimes even adds to it since frightened unarmed citizens often beg for more government "protection." To the left, gun control is never the real agenda--control is.
I Lost My Shotgun
Sajid Ali Khan - London
John Lott is right. After the knee-jerk legislation consequent on a shooting at a school in Dunblane, Scotland (MP now Lord Robertson, important in NATO, no less), I cannot have my Rigby 16-bore double-barreled shotgun, albeit I had Scotland Yard permission to keep it at home. As Mr. Lott says, at the same time there seems to be no difficulty in obtaining guns for use for killing, wounding and intimidation. A topsy-turvy world over here. And no indication that MPs will be persuaded to vote to overturn this legislation at present.
Bang!
Steven Platzer - Chicago
If "making guns more available is a better formula for law and order," then does it follow that everyone should walk around packing heat? Sounds like that would be a formula for disaster to me.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/responses/html?article_id=105002026
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
JOHN R. LOTT JR.
Why Do They Want Us Disarmed?
Alice Felt - Walla Walla, Wash.
Regardless of the research, which admittedly is needed to make the argument convincing, it just makes so much sense that arming citizens will deter and reduce crime. We unfortunately live in a world with criminals. That's a fact everyone should be able to agree on. Criminals likely will have no problem violating any gun-control laws. They will have access to guns and will use them. This we all know. It just makes sense that in such a world, law-abiding citizens should be able to have access to guns to not only defend themselves but to also act as a deterrent. Why this isn't clear to the great minds that keep pushing gun-control is a mystery, unless they have other motives for wanting an unarmed populace. I can only imagine what that might be.
The Real Problem Is Shame Control
Roy Fassel - Los Angeles
I was telling a friend the other day when the story came out about the German shooting, that "If I had one dollar left in this whole world, I would bet it all on a sure thing. The Wall Street Journal would have a editorial column about the need for guns and the limitations of gun controls." I would have doubled my net worth on this bet.
You are missing one very important part of the German student story. A teach went up to the shooting killer student, totally unarmed, and told the student that he (the teacher) would not fight, but wanted the student to look him (the teacher) in the eye as he (the killer student) killed him. The student laid down the gun and said, "No. That is enough killing for one day." I have one question. Only one. In this scenario, does anyone think the student would not have shot an armed teacher?
No question. Gun controls do not slow down shootings. No question. Having everyone armed won't either. Only shame can do it. Guns eliminate shame.
Check Out His Work
Mary Rosh - Philadelphia
Mr. Lott's work is impressive. For those who question it, they should take a few minutes to look at one of his studies. His work on multiple victim shootings can be found at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=272929.
Crime rates vary across countries for a lot of different reasons, but what is interesting is how the rates increase when law-abiding citizens are disarmed.
Lock Up the Criminals
Keith Russell - Spring, Texas
The reality is that both sides are wrong. Guns or lack thereof has less to do with safety than having criminals running loose. The real solution is that once someone has been determined to be a violent criminal they need to be excluded from society (placed in prison).
'Drink for Success'
Theodore Stanford - Las Cruces, N.M.
A comparison between the two studies on today's OpinionJournal pages is in order. Christopher Auld finds a correlation between drinking and income, and mentions that he is not the first to notice this. Yet he cautions us against drawing any of the obvious conclusions, and rightly so. Without more information, it is impossible to know whether alcohol stimulates productivity, or excess income encourages alcoholism, or whether there is some other mechanism going on in which the two are only tangentially related.
On the other hand, John Lott cites a few selected statistics on guns and crime, and expects us to assume that they support the idea that gun control is counterproductive. The article doesn't come close to making a compelling case. The high-profile public massacres that he mentions are a tiny fraction of all homicides, and are (fortunately) not frequent enough here or in Europe to form an accurate statistical picture. Also, there are several plausible explanations for why gun violence has increased in Britain and Australia since the gun laws were tightened. For example, violence may have already been on an upward trend for other reasons, and in fact this may have been why more restrictive gun laws were passed. It is impossible to know, without further evidence, what effect the new laws had on the crime trends already playing out.
The sort of statistical "evidence" displayed in Lott's article can be easily marshaled by almost anyone trying to "prove" almost anything. If Auld took the same attitude as Lott, he would be writing a book called "Drink for Success."
We Check Guns More Carefully Than People
Paul Wilson - Syracuse, N.Y.
It is ironic that an instant background check can be made on a U.S. citizen for the purchase of a handgun while a foreign visitor has little or no background check to enter our country. He can sign a few papers and disappear into the population. Hey, we can at least be sure he is not legally carrying a gun from his foreign land. Makes sense to me.
Logic Shows Why Gun Control Doesn't Work
Abraham Hudgins - Eva, Ala.
This article is absolutely correct. It only takes a small amount of logical reasoning to come to the answer to crime control. It will never come from gun control (criminals love gun-control laws). It will come only from criminal control, and since police can not be everywhere at once (even though they do try, and I appreciate that) it is up to the citizens most of the time to protect themselves and those around them until the cops get there.
The logic flows like this: If you pass a gun law, the law-abiding citizens (those you are not worried about) will obey it by definition. Also by definition, the criminals (those you are worried about) will ignore it. Therefore by passing the gun law, you have disarmed the victim you say you are trying to protect and empowered the predator because he now knows that he is the only one who will have a gun in any confrontation. It also follows that if there was a universal right to carry a concealed weapon for law-abiding citizens (criminals already do this remember), the criminal would not know whom he could safely rob and who might blow his head off.
Being the usual cowardly bullies they are, criminals would seek safer hunting grounds like maybe England or Australia. Result: Crime drops here, crime rises there until they learn the same lesson in logic that we must.
Gun Controllers Can't Control Themselves
Charles Mitchell - Winchester, Ohio
Why is it that seemingly intelligent people can't grasp the simple fact that an armed citizenry is the single best guarantee of freedom for all citizens? Could it be that their real purpose in denying the obvious is to ensure the loss of freedom for most citizens? Of course they don't include themselves among the losers because they have designs on being the winners, or rulers of a weaponless society. For every instance these antigun nuts can cite in which guns were used to commit crimes, I can cite 10 in which law-abiding citizens used guns to prevent crimes and save the lives of themselves and others.
Of course the gun grabbers don't practice what they preach in most cases, as witnessed by observing their actions as opposed to their rhetoric. The late columnist Carl Rowan, an avowed gun banner who used his column almost daily to advocate the banning of guns used a (gasp) gun to shoot teenagers for the heinous crime of jumping his fence and swimming in his private pool. And who could forget that paragon of honesty Rosie O'Donnell who attacked Tom Selleck on her show for being a gun owner while employing a gun toting body guard and admitting to buying a rifle for a close relative? So the proof is there. They are quite sure their lives and property are more important than the lives and property of the masses. We are fast being the serfs of the lords.
Rumors That Deter
John Averyt - New York
An armed and dangerous citizenry, or the rumor of one, is indeed enough to send criminals packing to other, safer environs. Also, as demonstrated recently in California, an armed policeman parked outside a school, or an armed pilot inside the cockpit, I might add.
What a Treasure
Jerry Dunn - Greenville, S.C.
John Lott is a national treasure. His in-depth analysis and meticulous studies of the impacts of guns laws generated by the myriad of formulations of liberal "feel good" policies relentless destroys any rational basis for support of most existing as well as any basis for new gun control laws. And yet liberals persist in advancing new and different "schemes" for abridging the right to bear arms, all without foundation or valid justification, relying instead upon the same failed inane, emotionally derived poppycock.
And less some attempt to dismiss him out of hand as some type of right-wing kook, which is after all the typical liberal response when faced with arguments and facts they cannot refute, years ago I stumbled upon a C-Span 2 weekend book-review program in which Mr. Lott, then a member of staff of the University of Chicago School of Law, and more recently at Yale, was reviewing his initial book. He quietly and meticulously outlined the methodology he used and presented the data and graphs he developed, which exposed the failure of gun control laws to reduce "gun crime." His presentation made clear that he began his research with no preconceptions, merely a desire to determine the effects of the some 20,000-plus gun laws in achieving their stated objectives and in reducing violent crime. He used the diversity of laws within the several states as a basis for tracking impacts of new gun-control laws.
Notably, this was a virgin field, virtually no comprehensive statistically based studies had been conducted, despite the then 50 or more years of state, local and federal legislation regarding gun controls! That's right, multiple decades of laws enacted without any real analytic effort made to exam the impacts to assure that the promised "benefits," real or imagined had been achieved! He stated then that he was surprised when his research showed that the impact of more severe gun control laws was to increase rather than decrease violent crime, including gun crime, precisely as his current article reveals in the case of Europe! How about that for a typical liberal feel-good average, zero for 20,000!
The New World Leads
Martin Heilweil - New York
I think that the Europeans' complaint that they are becoming more like America is a more inclusive complaint than the rise of gun crime (and nongun crime), and draws its animus from the failure of their cultures to compete successfully with ours. Hearts and minds, you know.
That having been said, the Europeans have not followed the U.S. further, (i) into the sterile debate into "root causes," which led us into 30 years, the 1960s to 1990s, of failed attempts to stop crime by "improving" society (e.g., "why do the French immigrant Arabs hate France so much, it has been so good to them"), and (ii) into the productive "lock 'em up" approach (1990s to 2000s), under which perhaps 0.5% to 1% of all Americans are in prison, and as much as one third of some demographic groups are under some form of criminal justice supervision, which has led to the to two-thirds or three-fourths decline in crime rates.
The New World still leads the Old.
(Hint: The U.S. has the death penalty, at least nominally)
If You Like Guns So Much, Go to Yemen
Bryan N. Georgiady - Kernersville, N.C.
Mr. Lott is playing his figures like a Stradivarius violin. The massive gun crime increases he cites in Britain, Australia and elsewhere are all in percentages. Show us the real numbers.
For one example, he stated that, "since the [British] ban, gun crimes have risen by an astounding 40%." True, but the actual number is still only around 7,000. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, gun crimes in America numbered around 533,000 in 2000. Population-adjusted, the average American is still 16 times as likely to face an armed offender as a British person.
And although assault and burglary are still only slightly higher in Britain, the murder rate--also adjusted to population--is roughly 600% higher in America than in Britain (approximately 1.3 per 100,000 residents vs. 7.8). Here, 60% to 70% of all murders (around 8,000 per year) are facilitated by firearms. How many of those began as simple robberies?
I'd feel safer in Britain than in America any day. I would also encourage all "guns for safety" proponents like Mr. Lott to spend an extended period of time in a firearm-friendly locale like Yemen, or perhaps Afghanistan.
Studying the Studies
Thomas Dillard - Escazu, Costa Rica
This is turning out to be a great night for studying studies. I am glad that we are consumers of the products from countries that prohibit the sale and use of their guns at home, and not the other way around.
The other surprise is the loving care that is placed on the finish of guns that come from these countries; real works of art. Belgian Brownings and British doubles are suitable as museum pieces, while guns manufactured in the U.S. when we still made them were mundane and repeaters could be bought in most towns for as little as $12. And they got used for protection, but more often for meat.
Obviously, the forbidden fruit is always the most desirable, and to a troubled person without power, a gun seems the best way to secure it. The prettier, the better. But something else is happening. In Oregon, where I grew up, many of us received 22 "single shots" (Winchesters were $5.95) for Christmas in the fifth or sixth grade. No big deal. But a while ago in Springfield, just 75 miles away, a crazed gun worshipping boy of 16, killed his loving parents first, then went to work in the school cafeteria on his schoolmates, until a number were killed and wounded before a couple of heroic students subdued him. Both of these came from families of ardent hunters. All of this in Oregon, a state of great social rest?
Before any problem is solved, the problem must be defined first, and it hasn't happened in Oregon, the rest of the U.S., or on any of the other continents. Any suggestions?
The Left's Evolution
Duane Speight - Prosperity, S.C.
When the more militant elements of the American left declared an armed rebellion against the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s, their primary targets were policemen. These "revolutionaries" converted the old slogan of the NRA, "If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns," into "If guns are outlawed only cops will have guns."
At the time, they wanted to be able to arm themselves to kill the government's "pigs." Now these antiquated dope-damaged Maoists and their liberal ilk "are" the government. Needless to say, their point of view toward gun control has evolved to incorporate both slogans but in a twisted kind of way--namely that it is now quite acceptable for cops "and" outlaws to be armed.
For the first protects their power and the latter doesn't threaten it and sometimes even adds to it since frightened unarmed citizens often beg for more government "protection." To the left, gun control is never the real agenda--control is.
I Lost My Shotgun
Sajid Ali Khan - London
John Lott is right. After the knee-jerk legislation consequent on a shooting at a school in Dunblane, Scotland (MP now Lord Robertson, important in NATO, no less), I cannot have my Rigby 16-bore double-barreled shotgun, albeit I had Scotland Yard permission to keep it at home. As Mr. Lott says, at the same time there seems to be no difficulty in obtaining guns for use for killing, wounding and intimidation. A topsy-turvy world over here. And no indication that MPs will be persuaded to vote to overturn this legislation at present.
Bang!
Steven Platzer - Chicago
If "making guns more available is a better formula for law and order," then does it follow that everyone should walk around packing heat? Sounds like that would be a formula for disaster to me.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/responses/html?article_id=105002026
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878