Restrictions on US gun ownership

[Kaz]

Compared to the US, our gun crime stats are a teeny tiny drop in the ocean!

Obama has tried, but making a big change in their gun laws will be almost impossible. For a start the NRA has huge political clout over there, lots of money behind it and politicians need huge amounts of money behind them there to get elected.

Then, it is amazing how otherwise entirely sensible and kind people think that it's normal to have guns in the house, or even tote them about when out shopping or carrying on with their daily lives, The right to bear arms seems engrained The attitude is that if they don't have these guns, they will be immediately vulnerable and under attack. It's madness, total paranoia in fact

[cromwell]

I think it is something deep within the American psyche Kaz. Their nation was only born because their citizens had guns and were able to resist an oppressive government (Us!).

Os, there are various ways people can get a handgun even today. One is by finding an "old spec" deactivated pistol and seeing if an engineer pal can re-activate it. Another, and this sounds like what Birmingham is experiencing, is the "obsolete calibre" pistol.

An obsolete calibre pistol can be purchased without a Fire Arms Certificate, because nobody makes ammunition for these guns anymore. So you can legally buy a pistol which may be in perfect working order. Then (and this is where it gets very ILLEGAL) you have to make the ammunition; but if you do your research you can cut down the work you need to do to make the ammunition (this is where the 'home made' ammo will be coming into it I suppose).

Or you might know someone from the Balkan states. Plenty of guns there after the wars there and the fall of communism, and what with open borders I'll be willing to bet some of them have arrived in the UK.

[Suff]

Back when Blair banned the hand guns as a knee jerk reaction to Dunblane, I predicted the rise of gun related crime from the criminals. Ossie, I suspect that the introduction of the hand guns in the first place has driven the less wealthy to create their own. After all the world was making firearms in the garden shed for more than 200 years before it was industrialised.

This is a problem of the making of the Government. If they want to fix it they need to do stop and search targeted to the groups with the highest probability of carrying them. If that means that the Police have to hassle one racial subset of a particular community, then so be it. If they were not carrying guns they would not be stopped and searched.

Pointing at others and ridiculing them for trying to do simple, sensible, measured approaches to restricting the flood of guns does not absolve the government of the idiotic decisions in the past....

[Aggers]

I can well understand, to some extent, a typical American's attitude.

The owning of guns has been the norm for them for donkeys' years,
and having one must probably give them some feeling of security.

[Kaz]

Whereas in reality it just makes them far less safe! The numbers killed accidentally are scary! Children playing with guns they've found hidden. women hiding guns in their bras (seriously) then the guns going off and killing them, all sorts of horrendous, hideous incidents. I have a lot of American FB 'friends' and these news itmes come up on my news feed all the time Not to mention the fact that if some lunatic with a grudge goes on a spree, he does far less damage with a knife than he can with a gun....

[Workingman]

The mindset that owning a gun makes one safer is what needs to be broken. However, with there being 1.2 registered hand guns per capita in the USA that will be nigh on impossible.

"Everyone else has one, why not me"?

Obama's new rules will not change the mindset, nor will they stop people with no mental health or criminal records from getting guns. All they will do is tighten up the registration process of both sellers and buyers.

Another thing they are unlikely to solve is the problem of guns of those who have died. Relatives are supposed to hand them in or dispose of them within 15 days, but this seems to have not been enforced with any great vigour. In fact when Buffalo Police announced that they would cross-reference the names of those with register handguns and obituaries, in an attempt to keep weapons off the streets, the locals were up in arms.

[Kaz]

Agreed it will be nigh on impossible, but the stats there from gun death are frightening

[Suff]

the stats there from gun death are frightening

Not quite as frightening as you might think in comparison to the UK.

In the US, where they have 1.2 weapons registered per person, in 2013 there were 37 murders per million people in the country.

In 2002/3 in the UK, where we had just had the ultra gun control measure of removing the hand guns, that was 18 recorded gun related homicides per million people.

Granted the UK has reduced that to 9 recorded homicides per million people. BTW, a salient point that. The UK has HALF the number or recorded murders with a firearm today as it did in 2002/3. Not what you would think from the News is it?

Given that the UK does not have the right to bear arms, the UK controls guns extremely strictly and the UK has, generally, lower unemployment, less gang issues and less inner city depravation than the US (Also the UK has a welfare state and the NHS which the US does not) I would say that it is EXTREMELY worrying that the UK had 50% of the gun related murders of the US and still has 25% of the gun related murders today.

That, to me, says that gun controls on their own do not work. There needs to be active policing and control of the population most likely to use guns to murder someone.