Gun control is a flawed policy

1. The true flaw is always with the implementation and culture, not the policy/policies of Gun Control.
   
2. The endgame of Gun Rights (as opposed to control), unless you're a lunatic, is to remove the need for guns in the first place.
   
3. The policy of Gun Control is possibly one of the most sound ones out there, for it directly addresses what it wants to achieve and not achieve by how tailored it is to the point between 'gun rights for all' and 'gun ban for all' (where it is between there is always precise for any place employing it and this makes it a very exact, sound policy indeed).
   
4. The reason it fails in places like US states with gun-heavy states nearby is due to smuggling and complete failure of such places to attempt successful gun control. It succeeds far better in islands that employ it (UK, Australia and Japan) and this is again going to link core point 1.
   

In 2002, a mentally impaired student at Monash University in Melbourne shot two people dead and injured five others. He came to his rampage with six handguns, not an assault rifle. Had he been carrying an AR-15, the toll would have been far worse. But even so, Australian lawmakers added a new National Handgun Agreement, a separate buyback act, and a reformulated gun trafficking policy to their legislative arsenal.

There has been no similar shooting spree since.

But it wasn’t just the murderous rampages that faded away. Gun violence in general declined over the following two decades to a nearly unimaginable degree. In 2014, the latest year for which final statistics are available, Australia’s murder rate fell to less than 1 killing per 100,000 people—a murder rate one-fifth the size of America’s.

Just 32 of those homicides—in a nation of 24 million people—were committed with guns. By comparison, more than 500 people were shot dead last year in the city of Chicago alone. (Chicago has about 2.7 million residents.)

Perhaps most remarkable is what happened with gun suicides in Australia in the wake of the post-Port Arthur firearm legislation. They dropped by some 80 percent, according to one analysis.

What stopped many of those would-be suicides—quite straightforwardly, it seems—was the lack of access to a gun, a generally immediate and effective method of killing. (Nine out of 10 suicide attempts with a firearm result in death, a far higher share than attempts by other methods.) Public health experts call such an effect “means restriction.” Some Australians found other ways to take their own lives—but for many, that acute moment of sadness and resolve passed in the absence of a gun.

Suicide “is commonly an impulsive act by a vulnerable individual,” explain E. Michael Lewiecki and Sara A. Miller in the American Journal of Public Health. “The impulsivity of suicide provides opportunities to reduce the risk of suicide by restricting access to lethal means.”

Which brings us back to the here and now. In 2015, an unthinkable 22,103 Americans shot themselves to death with a gun (see Table I-21)—accounting for just over half of the suicides in the country that year.

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen without all those guns at the ready. In a world of raging hypotheticals, we actually have some good, hard answers for this. All we have to do is look down under. There are millions of American families begging us to do it.

• Japan is a country of more than 127 million people, but it rarely sees more than 10 gun deaths a year.
  
• Culture is one reason for the low rate, but gun control is a major one, too.
  
• Japan has a long list of tests that applicants must pass before gaining access to a small pool of guns.
  

Gun control discussions crop up every time there is an attention-grabbing shooting in the US. On Wednesday, a 19-year-old allegedly shot dozens of his former classmates at a Florida high school, leaving 17 of them dead.

One of the biggest questions: How does the US prevent this from happening over and over again?

Although the US has no exact counterpart elsewhere in the world, some countries have taken steps that can provide a window into what successful gun control looks like. Japan, a country of 127 million people and yearly gun deaths rarely totaling more than 10, is one such country.

"Ever since guns entered the country, Japan has always had strict gun laws," Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a British advocacy group, told the BBC. "They are the first nation to impose gun laws in the whole world, and I think it laid down a bedrock saying that guns really don't play a part in civilian society."

Japan is a country with regulations upon regulations

Japan's success in curbing gun deaths is intimately linked with its history. Following World War II, pacifism emerged as one of the dominant philosophies in the country. Police only started carrying firearms after American troops made them, in 1946, for the sake of security. It's also written into Japanese law, as of 1958, that "no person shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords."

Government has since loosened the law, but the fact Japan enacted gun control from the stance of prohibition is important. (It's also one of the main factors separating Japan from the US, where the Second Amendment broadly permits people to own guns.)

If Japanese people want to own a gun, they must attend an all-day class, pass a written test, and achieve at least 95% accuracy during a shooting-range test. Then they have to pass a mental-health evaluation, which takes place at a hospital, and pass a background check, in which the government digs into their criminal record and interviews friends and family. They can only buy shotguns and air rifles — no handguns — and every three years they must retake the class and initial exam.

Even Japanese riot police infrequently turn to guns, instead preferring long batons. Toru Hanai/Reuters

Japan has also embraced the idea that fewer guns in circulation will result in fewer deaths. Each prefecture — which ranges in size from half a million people to 12 million, in Tokyo — can operate a maximum of three gun shops; new magazines can only be purchased by trading in empty ones; and when gun owners die, their relatives must surrender the deceased member's firearms.

From the moment 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton unloaded his legally held arsenal of handguns on children and staff at Dunblane primary school on 13 March 1996, gun control was on the cards.

Nothing like Dunblane – a massacre of 16 five- and six-year-olds, along with the teacher who tried to protect them – had taken place before in Britain. The shock and collective grief of the whole nation resonated from the northernmost point of Scotland to the tip of Cornwall. This was not the United States, where by 1996, classroom shootings had occurred in many places including Nashville, San Diego and South Carolina.

As grief turned to a national anger, public debate focused on how someone like Hamilton, a former Scout leader who had been ostracised because of his suspicious behaviour with young boys, had been allowed to own such lethal weapons.

Public petitions, most notably by the Snowdrop Campaign, founded by friends of the bereaved families, called for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the UK. Signed by 750,000 people it was symbolic of the weight of public opinion.

Nine years before Dunblane, there had been Hungerford, where Michael Ryan went on a rampage through the Berkshire town, killing 16 people in a series of random shootings before turning the gun on himself. He had been carrying a handgun and two semi automatic rifles, for which he had firearms certificates.

The aftermath of Hungerford brought to an end the right to own semi-automatic firearms in Britain; they were banned along with pump action weapons, and registration became mandatory for shotgun owners.

With Dunblane the focus turned to handguns – held by tens of thousands who took part in pistol shooting across the country. The Conservative then prime minister, John Major, passed the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 after the Cullen inquiry into the massacre. It banned all cartridge ammunition handguns, except 22 calibre single-shot weapons.

But with the landslide election of Labour and Tony Blair the same year, the law was tightened further, and the remaining .22 cartridge handguns were also banned. The decision, supported by a majority of the public, all but wiped out target shooting as a sport in the UK.

Dave Thompson, chief constable of the West Midlands, and the lead on gun crime for the National Association of Chief Constables, said: “The legislation coincided very well with a culture.”

Overnight, however, about 200,000 owners of handguns, most of whom kept them for pistol shooting, found their weapon banned and their pastime wiped out. All small-bore pistols and rifles used by target shooters were included in the ban. Penalties for anyone in possession of an illegal firearm were tough - from heavy fines to prison terms of 10 years.

The hostility of those involved in the sport to what they term the draconian legislation is still strong, 20 years after Dunblane. Mike Wells, secretary of the Sportsman’s Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, set up in 1996 to counter public pressure for a ban on handguns, said politicians had been driven by a need to show they were doing something but their actions did nothing to stop the criminal use of guns. “It never, never has any effect. The criminal underworld in England, the drug dealers … have all got guns, but they are illegal guns,” he said.

Mark Mastaglio, an expert on firearms who worked for the Forensic Science Service for 20 years, said there was no evidence that the ban on handguns after Dunblane had done anything to cut the criminal use of firearms. “It was very rare that there was ever leakage from the licensed gun owners to the criminal fraternity. Most guns used by criminal are either illegally imported or converted weapons. And that remains the case today,” said Mastaglio.

Crime statistics in the years after the ban was introduced appear to support the theory that it had little impact. Gun crime rose sharply, to peak at 24,094 offences in 2003/4. After that the number of crimes in which a firearm was involved fell consistently, to 4,779 offences in 2013. In the year ending September 2015 there was a small rise of 4% to 4,994 offences.

Thompson said the legislation was only part of it: law enforcement agencies had to prove they would carry through on the tough penalties and there was also poor policing of gang areas, and poor ballistics records and analysis. Both were addressed in the early 2000s, when there was a huge decline in gun crime, he said.

But there has been only one mass shooting in the UK – in Whitehaven, Cumbria, in 2010, during which Derrick Bird killed 12 people – since Dunblane.

Mastaglio said: “Dunblane was certainly a turning point. It was a huge piece of legislation, and had a huge impact on registered gun owners in the UK. We now have one of the most stringent set of firearms legislation in the world – only Japan has tougher laws.”

1. That he concedes that there are nations that very efficiently enact gun control policy.
   
2. That the failure of gun policy to be enacted is never to do with the policy but the culture of the nations etc (he admits this by not addressing my points on it).
   
3. That murders happen anyway at even higher a rate  albeit not by guns.
   

A lot of smoke is being generated to cover up the fact that the horrific Florida school shooting that has left at least 17 dead results from a virtual absence of meaningful gun controls in the US, such that a few gun manufacturers are allowed to make powerful military-style weapons available to the homocidally insane and to gangbangers etc. The Las Vegas shooter, whom the US press has buried long ago, was not an immigrant. And, Britain has a lot of immigrants, too, but it has almost no gun murders.

The US policy of constantly endangering our children is enacted by a bought-and-paid-for Congress on behalf of 10 major gun manufacturers with an $8 billion industry. Most Americans don’t have or want a gun, and 50% of all guns in the US are owned by 3% of Americans, i.e. some 6 million people out of 320 million. That three percent would survive better security checks and a ban on assault weapons.

Last year, there were 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days in the United States. (This statistic covered just part of the year).

You’ll note you don’t hear about mass shootings in Australia, Japan or for the most part the United Kingdom, or other civilized countries whose politicians have not been bought by 10 major gun manufacturers.

The United States continues to be peculiar in handing out powerful magazine-fed firearms to almost anyone who wants one and not requiring background checks on private purchases even if these are made at gun shows or by persons with a history of mental illness. 80% of civilian-owned firearms world-wide are in the US, and only Yemen vaguely competes with us for rates of firearm ownership; Yemen is a violent mess with Shiite insurgencies, al-Qaeda taking over cities from time to time, tribal feuding, southern separatism and US drone strikes. And even it has fewer guns per person than the USA.

It has gotten to the point where the increasing epidemic of mass shootings now threatens law enforcement.

The US is downright weird compared to civilized Western Europe or Australia (which enacted gun control after a mass shooting in 1996 and there have been no further such incidents).

In 2015-16 (the twelve months beginning in March), there were 26 fatalities from gun-related crimes in England and Wales (equivalent to 130 because Great Britain 1/5 the size of the US).

Police in the UK fired their guns 7 times in 2015.

Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2016: 11,004

Percentage of all Murders that were committed by firearms in 2016 in US: 73%

Suicides in US 2015: 44,193

Gun Suicides in US, 2015: ~22,000

Percentage of suicides where the method was guns in 2015: 49.8

Percentage of all murders in England and Wales that were committed by firearm: 4.5 percent.

Academic research shows that more guns equal more suicides.

Number of suicides in England and Wales, 2016: 5,668 (equivalent to about 28,330 in US or 36% lower)

Number of suicides by firearam in England and Wales, 2011: 84 (this is the most recent statistic I could find but the typical percentage is given as 1.6% of all suicides; that would be the equivalent of 707 suicides by firearm in the US instead of 22,000).

For more on murder by firearms in Britain, see the BBC.

The US has the highest gun ownership in the world and the highest murder rate in the developed world.

It seems pretty clear, as well, that many US suicides would not occur if firearms were not omnipresent.

There is some correlation between high rates of gun ownership and high rates of violent crime in general, globally (and also if you compare state by state inside the US):

In the case of Britain, firearms murders are 53 times fewer than in the US per capita. [Don’t bother with flawed citations of Switzerland or Israel, where most citizens are the equivalent of military reservists.]

Following the Christchurch shooting, in which 50 people were killed, New Zealand’s government has announced it will be reforming the country’s gun laws.

According to the GunPolicy.org website maintained by the University of Sydney, New Zealand currently has gun laws that are more restrictive in comparison to some countries but more permissive than others, such as Australia’s.

People must have a licence to own guns, and the licence requires background checks. While dealers must keep a record of the guns they sell, most guns are not required to be tracked in a central register to monitor changes in ownership due to private sales.

 

New Zealand law also permits ownership of semi-automatic rifles, such as the AR 15-style gun, used previously in US mass shootings. These rifles are able to be bought under a category A licence, but the licence only covers magazines that hold seven cartridges. While it has been confirmed that the Christchurch shooter legally obtained at least four guns, included two semi-automatic rifles, the shooter also reportedly used larger magazines capable of holding more ammunition.

In a press conference on Monday, New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, made specific reference to Australia’s implementation of stricter gun laws following the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, in which 35 people were killed and 23 were wounded.

So, what happened with Australia’s laws, and how has gun control worked in other countries?

The Australian situation

Following the Port Arthur incident, Australia implemented the National Firearms Agreement (NFA).

New, uniform state gun laws banned rapid-fire guns from civilian ownership except under certain, restricted licences, and established a government buyback of semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns.

Another requirement was that all guns must be individually registered, with all gun sales tracked to record changes in ownership. Previously, registration varied by state and gun type. The laws reduced guns in Australia by about one-fifth, with more than 700,000 guns removed and destroyed.

There have been a number of studies published on the impact of the NFA on firearm-related deaths in Australia. According to a 2011 summary of the research by the Harvard Injury Control Research Centre, a number of studies suggested beneficial effects from the law changes, with a reduction in mass shootings, and a reduction in the rate of firearm-related deaths (both homicides and suicides) overall.

Researchers from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University in 2006, 2016 and 2018 looked at the number of mass killings before and after the NFA, and also whether the law changes affected the number of firearm-related deaths. They found that there was a drop in the rate of firearm deaths – particularly with suicides – but were cautious about attributing this to the NFA with the methods they used.

Their research also showed that while there had been 13 mass shootings (using the definition of five or more people killed) in the 18 years before the law changes, there had been none in the 22 years following (though there was one mass shooting involving seven members of one family at Margaret River in Western Australia in May 2018).

Modelling suggested that if shootings had continued at a similar rate as that prior to the NFA, then approximately 16 incidents would have been expected by February 2018.

The Relationship Between Gun Laws and Gun Deaths

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Southern states along the Mississippi River have consistently reported some of the highest rates of firearm deaths. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas currently fall within the top 10 for firearm deaths. One legislative similarity that all of these states share is that none of them require license, registration or permit to buy a gun, though there are dozens of other states with the same regulations. Still, the states surrounding the Mississippi River Delta were rated as some of the most lenient in terms of gun law stringency, according to Crimadvisor.

A Side-by-Side Look at Firearm Deaths and Gun Laws

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Conversely, while Washington and Rhode Island have some of the most restrictive gun laws in the U.S., they fall on the lower end of firearm death rates in the country. Six out of the top 10 states for firearm deaths enacted "stand your ground" laws around 2006.