You pretend you can’t just walk down the streets of any major city and find illegal drugs. It’s easier and cheaper to get illegal drugs than prescription drugs which are legal.
Any second hand gun sale must be recorded. Anyone who doesn’t report a gun sale is a moron. Not only are they breaking the law, but they are opening themselves to liability if the gun is used in a crime. People who plan on committing crimes aren’t going to do it with a registered gun. They’re going to get their gun on the black market.
go after all illegal gun, gangsta, put criminal in jail instead of releasing them. Make neighborhood safe first and i’m sure by then a lot of people will be willing to give up their gun on their own. what’s the respond police tim in san jose now days?
right never is what i heard, they just tell you to go file police report online. And these police buyback program is a joke, they pay like a hundred buck, and people are giving them broken old gun. GOV claims look, we took off xxxx # of guns of the street, but in reality, they give XXX amount of money to buy junk and giving people extra cash to buy new working functioning gun.
Oh yeah, i remember our great politican leland yee.
I’ve seen no indication that we have similar gun laws to Australia. Please feel free to share any links.
Granted, killers can use other means if they are bound and determined to kill. But absent easy access to guns that have the capacity for mass killing, killers are far less likely to wreak the level of carnage that guns can cause.
It’s hard to think of anything else the killer in Las Vegas could have easily accessed that he could unleash, from the distance of a 32nd story window, to create that level of confusion and horror on those innocent victims.
Do you really believe that without guns they’d stop killing each other? Do you think making guns illegal would stop those people from getting them? Chicago has super strict gun laws yet has tons of shootings. What percent of homicides are by a legal gun owner? They ended up estimating 3-11% of guns used in crimes were legally purchased. That means the biggest issue is already black market, illegal guns.
Where do the guns come from that were illegally purchased? From the legal owners who had them stolen. Owning a gun makes you a target for a theft.
By the way, Chicago’s gun laws don’t work that well because they are too small an entity to control things. You need at least to control on a statewide basis and even that may not be enough.
Sorry, this country is too soft to enforce its own laws. How many death row inmates do we have in Cali? Does it really make sense that we want to make sure the criminal does not feel pain when we are essentially killing him/her? No, we shouldn’t care, quite frankly. In fact, maybe if we show it all in full glory 4K HD during prime time our future generations will get it, that crime does not pay or you will be next…
232K guns are stolen each year. There’s over 300M guns in America. So that’s under 0.1% stolen each year.
“It’s actually not that hard to own a gun. But you do have to have a genuine reason. You have to be a member of a target shooting club or a hunter and you have to prove it. For hunting, you can get written permission from a landowner who says you are hunting on his land. Or you can join a hunting club. Pistols [handguns], on the other hand, are heavily restricted. All applicants undergo a background check by the police and there is a mandatory 30 day cooling off period for all license applications, both long arms and pistols. Firearms safety training courses are mandatory as well.”
Heavily regulated means background check and 30 day cooling off period. The US has background check Waiting period varies by state. We don’t have a safety course. The laws aren’t that dramatically different.
Thanks for sharing the article from an Australian gun owner’s perspective. Very interesting.
However, I’m a bit confused by your interpretation, as the whole article describes extensive regulations that are far different from US laws. Your quote alone indicates key regulations we don’t have: "…you do have to have a genuine reason. You have to be a member of a target shooting club or a hunter and you have to prove it. For hunting, you can get written permission from a landowner who says you are hunting on his land. Or you can join a hunting club. "
Some key highlights from the article:
“…the government established different types of firearms for different categories of guns and ruled that each would need different licenses.”
“…the police can come to your house and inspect your storage… All the ammunition is stored separately to the rifles and the pistols. If you have more than 15 or so pistols, you’ve got to have a monitored alarm. If someone were to break into my house, or into my gun room, an alarm would go off and the police would be notified immediately. The police are required to inspect your gun room.”
“If you’re transporting a rifle or a pistol in Australia, it’s got to have a trigger lock on it, so that if someone got to your car or you’re in transit pulling up and they break into your boot [trunk], there’s a lock on the pistol or the rifle. No firearms are allowed to be transported in a loaded condition. All ammunition has got to be carried in a separate locked container.”
“Pistols have more stringent rules. There’s a probationary period of six months and you have to turn up at your club and do eight competition shoots a year. If you’ve got different types of pistols it’s 12. So you’ve got to be committed to the sport.”
And even more illuminating is this Australian gun enthusiast’s view on the regulations:
"All these things I agree with. I would feel less safe where in Texas where everybody’s walking around with open carry. That would freak me out. It freaks me out enough to see the police all armed at the airport. Would I walk around the street with a pistol loaded on my waist? No way.
When then Prime Minister John Howard proposed the gun law I marched like everybody else did in opposition to it. But I now fully endorse what he did. I didn’t like handing over my rifles, but at the end of the day, it’s a small price to pay not to have the nut-jobs walking through shopping centers and massacring innocent people.
Australia is a great country. You can go hunting, you can go shooting. And as long as you hurt nobody and abide the law you can continue to do it. That to me is freedom. The idea of having people own guns with no concept of gun safety and no reason to have a gun? That is not my idea of freedom."
@manch, the descriptions he shared of the different licenses indicates yes, but in very limited conditions (I don’t know much about guns, so i’m guessing semiautomatics are assault rifles?)
Here are the different license descriptions he gave:
Category A is .22s, shotguns and air rifles. That’s the easiest license to obtain. No semiautomatics are allowed.
Category B is for center fire rifles. You have to provide a reason for why you need a more powerful gun. I shoot feral pigs and foxes; that’s a valid reason. Again, no semiautomatics.
Category C is available only to farmers; they can own a semiautomatic shotgun or .22 but the cartridges are limited to five shots for the shotgun and 10 shots for the .22.
Category D, for semiautomatic guns and rifles, is only for professional shooters: you have to have a registered business and prove that you are earning an income through shooting.
An H license is for handguns. If you want to buy a pistol in Australia you’ve got to be a member of a target pistol club. You’ve got to do a minimum of eight competition shoots per year to keep your license. If you don’t, you lose it.
Category G is for collectors. For that you’ve got to attend at least one meeting per year.
Australia sounds like a very good model for USA. Enthusiasts and people who need guns for their livelihood get to have them. At the same time public safety is not bulldozed over for the joy of a few.
Is a genuine reason really a hurdle when anyone can join a hunting club?
Most states require guns to be unloaded and in a locked case when transported.
Our police don’t even have time to investigate minor crimes. Now we want them investigating gun storage? Notice he says they can inspect it. I wonder how often they actually do. Besides, less than 1% of guns are stolen each year.
Everyone acts like it’s legal gun owners committing massive amounts of crime. The data doesn’t support that. How many people with a valid concealed or open permit have committed a gun crime? You know if it happened the left media would be covering it non-stop.
I noticed that the piece you shared is listed as an opinion piece and contained vague declarations, so was curious about the author. Leah Lebresco is a blogger who graduated from Yale in 2011 with a bachelors in political science. While her alma mater is impressive, her degree and background does not instill confidence in her having an appropriate level of rigorous training and experience in research and statistical analyses. Note also that her research is not peer reviewed.
Research, peer reviewed:
Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at a higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
Across 26 developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.
After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide. This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide.
Where there are higher levels of gun ownership, there are more gun suicides and more total suicides, more gun homicides and more total homicides, and more accidental gun deaths… Suicides for all age groups and homicides for children and aging adults most often occurred in their own home.
Differences in rates of homicides of Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) across states are best explained not by differences in crime, but by differences in household gun ownership. In high gun states, LEOs are 3 times more likely to be murdered than LEOs working in low-gun states.
A review of 130 high-quality studies conducted in 10 countries over the past 60 years found evidence that gun control works. Specifically:
It usually takes major legislation overhaul - not just one new law - to see significant change.
Laws restricting the purchase of (e.g. background checks) and access to (e.g. safer storage) firearms are also associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively
Not sure if a hunting club is easy to join or not, but I’m glad there’s one point of contact someone with nefarious plans must make before proceeding. For some, it might be enough to deter them.
Not super familiar with gun culture, so not sure how this aligns with what you’re saying, but the majority of states have open carry and/or concealed carry. Folks are legally walking around with loaded guns, many of whom are not well-trained and/or not cool under pressure. Really doubt when most folks are confronted with danger that they’ll react like Jason Bourne.
Gentleman in the article said they inspected 3 or 4 times since the law was implemented (about 20 years). These random inspections seem worthwhile to me, balancing accountability with a not too onerous frequency. If this type of accountability prevents harm to a toddler or innocent victim due to a gun owner’s negligence, then it seems worth it.
It’s not productive to speculate, but the research in my post above supports that gun laws save lives.
Some of the cities with the highest murder rates are in states with below average gun ownership rates.
The 10 worst cities average 34.6 murders per 100K. The national average is 5.3 per 100K. Those 10 cities are 2% of the population and 14% of the homicides. Overall, the US is very, very safe. There are specific areas of high crime yet we’re pretending a national solution will fix those cities. Those cities have a host of problems besides homicide rate.
What’s even worse is up until the 70’s, high schools had riffle teams. Kids carried .22 caliber riffles to school. They shot targets on school grounds. How many school shootings happened back then? Then people decided guns are bad and evil, and we should make everyone afraid of them.
Look, I am pretty objective. I get the need/right for personal safety. I, too, would consider arming myself at my residence since it is just my wife and me (no kids). Frankly, IMHO, that is about it that one can justify owning. This lunatic had 40+ guns and god knows how many rounds. At some point, too much is too much. The problem I believe is just the semi automatic assault rifles that people modify to be practically fully automatic. The fact is, how much damage can a .22 rifle honestly do before help comes?
The thing that bothers me about pro gun folks is that they aren’t willing to compromise AT ALL. My god, we are in the 21st century and we are still allowing an individual the ability to wreck so many lives and damage on society. They fear that oh if you take this away then you will find a way to go further and take the rest of it away. No, that is not what I would do. I just want a solution. You can argue until the cows come home about how you are correct and how the stats say otherwise but at the end of the day you too can not refute that if there were a ban on semi automatic assault rifles this past Sunday night massacre OF SUCH MAGNITUDE simply does not happen.
Simple…allow shotguns for hunting and home protection… Ban everything else… Similar to England,
I like to hunt and shoot… But the NRA is pushing the idea that we need assault weapons to protect us against the government… But the government has tanks and nukes… There is no protection against that…
