At least check it before trying to use that in your defence...lol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
International Gun Ban Treaty
- Thread starter MobbinINda916
- Start date
I dunno about your states, but in Pennsylvania there's no gun registry. You have to get approved to get one, but after that there is no list of who owns guns and what the serial numbers are. I have a few guns I got from the store, and a few guns that I bought from my buddies and never did any type of title transfer. So if a gun ban comes into effect, how the hell are they gonna enforce it? Just have faith that we'll all willingly give up our guns? I doubt it. If anything, anyone who already owns a gun will probably grandfathered in or something. Plus, I can just imagine the reaction of all the hicks living in Appalachia when someone comes to their house to try to take their guns away from them. Don't mess with meth addicts that love the second amendment.
The government wouldn't be able to do much anways. The constitution trumps an international treaty. There are tons of international treaties the US has signed that don't have self-effecting status. Basically, unless Congress adopts a treaty after the president signs it, it means nothing. The President can sign treaties (like the Kyoto agreement on environmental regulations), just to make us look good in the international world, but the US is under no obligation to implement the treaty. On top of that, even if the President signs the treaty and Congress ratifies it as US law, it would still be overturned as unconstitional because of the 2nd Amendment. So, basically, this ain't happening.
It's a bit different because we don't have a bill of rights with the right to bear arms or a constitution or anything, we just do whatever our idiotic government tells us to do. I imagine it is a different ball game for you guys, but can you give us a rough idea of gun crime in states with some sort of gun regulation compared to those without?
As of 2010 California suffers 56% more gun murders than Texas. Similarly, of all ways to murder people, Californians murder people with guns 69% of the time, while Texans murder with guns only 65% of the time. This indicates that the average Californian is more likely to murder or be murdered with a gun than the average Texan.
No-one knows for sure how many guns exist, are owned, and who owns them, but I did find a 2001 survey that purportedly broke down likely gun ownership by state. According to these numbers, Texans as a whole own 45% more guns than Californians. That’s total guns, not guns per capita. So it would seem that even with fewer total guns spread among more people, more are still murdered with guns in California.
If you break down the number of gun murders per 100,000 people, we see the likelihood of gun murder relative to the size of the population. This is the actual likelihood that you will be murdered with a gun in that state. With this measure, we see that your chance of murder by gun is 1 in 29,674 in California, compared to the less likely 1 in 31,348 in Texas.
Interestingly, the most violent gun crime area in America by far is Washington DC. No state comes anywhere close. There is almost an order of magnitude more gun murders in Washington DC than any state. Your chance of being murdered with a gun in Washington DC is 1 in 6,250. Washington DC is infamous for its long standing ban on legal gun ownership by private citizens, in direct violation of the Second Amendment. This ban was partially lifted a couple years ago, but the restrictions on private gun ownership are still severely limited.
At the other end of the spectrum, the city of Kennesaw, Georgia has had a city ordinance since 1982 requiring all households to own at least one gun and ammunition for it, with the reasonable exceptions of the mentally handicapped, religiously convicted against guns, and known criminals. Their overall crime rate is half the US average.
No-one knows for sure how many guns exist, are owned, and who owns them, but I did find a 2001 survey that purportedly broke down likely gun ownership by state. According to these numbers, Texans as a whole own 45% more guns than Californians. That’s total guns, not guns per capita. So it would seem that even with fewer total guns spread among more people, more are still murdered with guns in California.
If you break down the number of gun murders per 100,000 people, we see the likelihood of gun murder relative to the size of the population. This is the actual likelihood that you will be murdered with a gun in that state. With this measure, we see that your chance of murder by gun is 1 in 29,674 in California, compared to the less likely 1 in 31,348 in Texas.
Interestingly, the most violent gun crime area in America by far is Washington DC. No state comes anywhere close. There is almost an order of magnitude more gun murders in Washington DC than any state. Your chance of being murdered with a gun in Washington DC is 1 in 6,250. Washington DC is infamous for its long standing ban on legal gun ownership by private citizens, in direct violation of the Second Amendment. This ban was partially lifted a couple years ago, but the restrictions on private gun ownership are still severely limited.
At the other end of the spectrum, the city of Kennesaw, Georgia has had a city ordinance since 1982 requiring all households to own at least one gun and ammunition for it, with the reasonable exceptions of the mentally handicapped, religiously convicted against guns, and known criminals. Their overall crime rate is half the US average.
New York, California and Illinois have some of the strictest gun laws, and they rank 2, 4, and 7 in gun deaths per capita. It's hard to say which states are the strictest...some have age limitations, some say you can only buy one gun a month, some say you can't own certain guns, some have background checks...but at the end of the day, almost anyone that wants a gun can get one.
I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't have more gun control. All I'm saying is that this problem is uniquely American because it is embedded into our constitution. On top of that, most Americans have some love affair with the second amendment. There's no way a politician in a pro-gun state is going to destroy his career to vote for something like this.
Either way though, I think the "right to bear arms" is pretty wide open. What kind of arms can we bear? Can we have missiles and nukes and automatic machine guns and tear gas and landmines? Where do we draw the distinction? The purpose of the 2nd Amendment was because owning guns were essential to rebelling against Great Britain - if we didn't have guns, we wouldn't have had the American Revolution. The 2nd Amendment was put into place to make sure that we would always be able to rise up against the government if it ever became too authoritarian. But the reality of it is that our current right to bear arms doesn't give us that protection. Give every citizen in the US at .40 caliber Glock, and then tell them to overthrow our government. It would never happen. The US has the most military firepower in the world, and it would be virtually impossible for us to overthrow the government. If we were really keeping with the spirit of the Constitution, we would let civilians have nuclear warheads so that we'd be on the same level as the US Government. And to me that just doesn't sound like the best idea. The spirit of the 2nd Amendment is gone. Not to mention the necessity of owning guns (i.e. to hunt and feed your family) is way outdated.
I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't have more gun control. All I'm saying is that this problem is uniquely American because it is embedded into our constitution. On top of that, most Americans have some love affair with the second amendment. There's no way a politician in a pro-gun state is going to destroy his career to vote for something like this.
Either way though, I think the "right to bear arms" is pretty wide open. What kind of arms can we bear? Can we have missiles and nukes and automatic machine guns and tear gas and landmines? Where do we draw the distinction? The purpose of the 2nd Amendment was because owning guns were essential to rebelling against Great Britain - if we didn't have guns, we wouldn't have had the American Revolution. The 2nd Amendment was put into place to make sure that we would always be able to rise up against the government if it ever became too authoritarian. But the reality of it is that our current right to bear arms doesn't give us that protection. Give every citizen in the US at .40 caliber Glock, and then tell them to overthrow our government. It would never happen. The US has the most military firepower in the world, and it would be virtually impossible for us to overthrow the government. If we were really keeping with the spirit of the Constitution, we would let civilians have nuclear warheads so that we'd be on the same level as the US Government. And to me that just doesn't sound like the best idea. The spirit of the 2nd Amendment is gone. Not to mention the necessity of owning guns (i.e. to hunt and feed your family) is way outdated.