Which is surely the point.
Crime becomes more dangerous - rather than an easy way to get money, it's now 50/50 whether you'll get your money or get shot and captured in the process.
Now show me the statistics on how this curbs crime. Inherently, criminals have more to lose than those they rob. Criminals taking the initiative counting on their opponent having a gun, regardless of whether their victim has a gun or not, always have more than a 50/50 chance. They will still be pursued and even if only 15% get caught, that puts them at much lower than 50/50 odds. Both parties, however, have a bigger chance of getting killed, just with two guns being present rather than one.
With "Demanding Money with Menaces" being a maximum 15 year term and First Degree Murder being a Capital offence, I imagine that, although you'll see the crazed loon type armed robber, it won't be contagious. After all, we see the crazed loon type armed robber now - only he's armed with a hunting knife at the moment.
Which still isn't as effective as a gun, apparently. Why else do you think criminals and people are walking around carrying guns rather than hunting knives. They haven't seen the light yet?
I'll run these numbers through:
Netherlands - 2% households with firearm; 70 deaths by firearm; 15.5 million population.
Belgium - 20%; 384 deaths; 10.0 million population.
USA - 40%; 30,000 deaths; 275.0 million population.
That crunches to:
Netherlands - 1 gun death per 221,000 populous
Beligum - 1 per 26,000
USA - 1 per 9,000
But there are 20 times as many households in the USA with guns as opposed to Holland (and 10 times as many in Belgium). Levelling these figures out you get:
USA: 1 per 180,000 populous per gun owner
Netherlands: 1 per 221,000
Belgium: 1 per 260,000
For all those guns, Belgium is actually marginally safer than Holland, and the USA only marginally more dangerous - purely in terms of gun deaths. The Belgians have 10 times more guns, but only 5 times as many deaths. The Americans have 20 times more guns and 18 times the population to shoot at, but only have a slightly higher 428 times the number of deaths (19% extra, when weighted). What conclusions can we draw?
A very clear one, which is that more guns mean more deaths. That if Belgium had less guns, it would have been safer than the Netherlands. Only they have ten times as many guns, so they aren't even close. That the U.S.A. would, even with 2% gun ownership, would probably still be less safe than the Netherlands, but that the difference would be marginal. Only they have twenty times the number of guns, and the correspondingly much higher death rate.
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I believe that in the US there is also a 7 day waiting period (it could be more, but I'm not totally familiar) from purchase to collection of firearms. That now rules out the temporarily insane, jealous and desperate (they can't be THAT desperate if they've been waiting for 7 days).
I don't pretend to have the answer to this - but criminalising gun possession isn't it. We did it 8 years ago and it's done precisely bugger all. [/color]
Figures, please. I can't find any to confirm. Rather the opposite, such as this interesting footnote in an online article:
[2] France, for example, has a higher proportion of households that have firearms than the U.K, and consequently has around 6 firearm deaths per 100,000 people, compared to the U.K that has a rate of less than 1 death per 100,000. See the table of firearm ownership and deaths in industrialised countries in Chapter 6: After the Smoke Clears: Assessing the Effects of Small Arms Availability of the Small Arms Survey 2001: Profiling the Problem, compiled by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (Oxford, Oxford University Press:
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/Yearbook/SAS2001Ch6_en.pdf, published 2001/accessed 15.04.02), p.1.
http://www.ex.ac.uk/politics/pol_data/undergrad/hill/new_page_5.htm
Also, you're claim that it didn't do anything good for the U.K. actually has little bearing on our current discussion, because there were never many guns to begin with:
"Australia's rate of firearm-related homicide is 0.4 per 100,000 population compared to 0.7 in Canada and 6.3 in the United States of America. In the United Kingdom, however, the firearm homicide rate is 0.1 per 100,000. The culture of firearms is less pervasive in the UK."
http://www.aic.gov.au/media/961104.html
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Personally I believe firearms shouldn't be illegal to own - but there must be a strictly enforced regulation of them, even stricter education on them (you take a course before your driving test - why not make a compulsory gun-sense course, which you must pass an exam on before you're allowed gun ownership?) and frequent examination of gun owners' home precautions against theft/misuse of their gun(s) and their levels of maintenance (again, we have the car checked once a year to make sure it's roadworthy...).[/size][/color]
If this were to be enforced strictly, it would probably further discourage the use of guns, limit it to fewer people, and help those people be safer about them, although I'm not quite sure how measures against theft are going to keep those guns effective in preventing buglary itself. I'm all for it, anything to lower the rates is better than not doing anything at all.
But the figures are clear as day on what really makes the world a safer place.
But seriously, lessons can be learned from that era - one of them is that a total mindless ban of guns without the support of U.S. citizens would probably only help organised crime make more money. Same could be said of drugs though, do you think they should all be legal? (I'm actually not as sure of the answer to that as you might think)
