varsovian 22.03.06, 12:44 What's Polish gun control like? ... this article got me thinking: www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,1736424,00.html Odpowiedz Link czytaj wygodnie posty
ianek70 Re: Right to bear arms - Polska 22.03.06, 13:15 varsovian napisał: > What's Polish gun control like? Apparently there are fewer guns in PL (both legal and illegal) than any other country in Europe. Can't remember the exact statistics, but the Finns are the most heavily armed (as they hunt a lot and enjoy running about forests), closely followed by the Czechs, for some reason. Odpowiedz Link
ianek70 Statistics 22.03.06, 19:14 Found some stats, which are completely unrelated to what I wrote earlier, but it's an interesting topic. Gun deaths per 100,000 people: '96 USA 5.29 Italy 1.66 '99-'00 USA 3.97 Canada 0.59 Germany 0.13 England & Wales 0.14 Australia 0.34 Switzerland 0.51 Sweden 0.37 Austria 0.34 New Zealand 0.15 Japan 0.02 Japan has the most restrictive gun laws of all these countries, Switzerland apparently has the least restrictive. In recent years, the UK has severely tightened gun laws, and gun crime has increased considerably. Canada has also severely tightened its laws, and gun crime there has significantly decreased. Google gun crime statistics europe and you'll find a million articles from the US press about the Americanisation of crime in the UK (mostly quite interesting), and some mad redneck gun-freak sites. www.ichw.org/statistics.htm The rednecks' main argument is that Americans draw their guns 2.5 million times a year in self-defence, but since they mostly want to defend themselves from gun-wielding maniacs, I don't really buy this argument. www.guncite.com/journals/dkjgc.html Odpowiedz Link
dandywarhol Re: Statistics 22.03.06, 22:48 More interesting: Suicides per 100,000 people (data from 1999 mostly) USA 21.7 Canada (1998) 24.6 Germany 27.5 UK 15.1 (Good job on not topping yourselves!) Australia 26.7 Switzerland 36.5 Sweden 27.7 Austria 37.1 New Zealand 30.6 Japan 50.6 So maybe guns make people happier? I know I sure enjoyed going target shooting. When my friend got a new toilet, we shotgunned the old one into itty-bitty pieces, highly satisfying. My university had a shooting range on campus where you could use the university-owned .22 pistols or bring your own .22 (they would have allowed larger calibers but the range wasn't built to stop bigger bullets, I think they were working on improving it). I knew tons of people with rifles/shotguns/pistols/revolvers and no one who had ever been shot or shot at someone or even pointed a gun at someone. People here who find out I owned a handgun in the US seem to be pretty surprised. Even air rifles aren't too popular. The state of Missouri voted on a bill to allow concealed carry of handguns - it passed pretty much everywhere in the state except for St. Louis, where the margin of defeat was so large that it overwhelmed the votes in favor elsewhere. St. Louis happens to have some very low-income areas. Speculation (which I happen to agree with) is that a lot of people there are involved either personally or through family members in robbing & burglarizing people and didn't want to get shot while stealing. Many cities (eg Chicago, Washington DC) that have enacted handgun bans have only seen crime rise. It's very interesting how suicide rates pretty much reverse the gun deaths chart. Japan especially has major problems with suicide but almost no gun violence (or guns either). Poland by the way is at 30.8/100,000. Personally I never felt in danger in Oregon despite the easy access to firearms and anyone with a clean criminal record being able to get a concealed carry permit just by taking a weekend-long training class. Now, my friend the Polish-born-but-raised-elsewhere physics professor scared me. One Christmas Eve I remember him taking out his revolver and letting the kids play with it! Clearly the man didn't know anything (or at least care) about handgun safety. I though it was a plastic toy until we were leaving and someone mentioned it was an actual firearm. Too bad I was so shocked that I didn't think to say anything until we had left. Requiring some amount of education might have avoided that situation, but frankly practically everyone is taught enough by peers that it'd be redundant. At this point there's so many guns in the US that banning handguns would result in only criminals having guns (in the sense that people out to commit crimes would be the armed ones, not the NRA-type argument about making law-abiding people into criminals). It's a violent culture to begin with though. Odpowiedz Link
ianek70 Re: Statistics 22.03.06, 23:11 dandywarhol napisał: > More interesting: > Suicides per 100,000 people (data from 1999 mostly) > USA 21.7 > Canada (1998) 24.6 > Germany 27.5 > UK 15.1 (Good job on not topping yourselves!) > Australia 26.7 > Switzerland 36.5 > Sweden 27.7 > Austria 37.1 > New Zealand 30.6 > Japan 50.6 A statistic which appears on all the anti-gun sites (but on none of the redneck sites) is the Suicide By Shooting Yourself With A Gun index. Suicidal Americans shoot their blues away (because they've got guns), while non- violent Brits OD on aspirin and paracetamol. Odpowiedz Link
dandywarhol Re: Statistics 23.03.06, 00:12 True dat. I bet that a higher percentage of Americans who attempt suicide succeed due to that, too. The fact remains that the suicide rate is lower, and sometimes considerably so. Of course anti-depressants are given out like candy so maybe that's the real reason. It's still my opinion that it's fun to shoot stuff. Fortunately there's enough room in most states that you don't have to worry about hitting someone by accident (apparently Texas could use more room when it hosts vice-presidents however). But I really don't see a reason to create a gun culture where there isn't one since there's so much crap you have to deal with that is intrinsically linked together. It's interesting no one has actually answered the original question. I don't know the specifics other than air rifles are OK, and there's some kind of permit for owning a firearm. Maybe rifles don't need them, I honestly have no idea. I just assume that it's a lot of effort, hassle, and probably money to get some limited amount of rights that you can't really use because there's no where to shoot anyway. Which is fine, I'll just go to the firing range on the Las Vegas Strip sometime and try some full-auto machine guns if I want. Odpowiedz Link
ianek70 Texas 23.03.06, 14:47 Why are folks allowed to fire guns in Texas when they're not allowed to do anything else? wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,60935,3230596.html Getting drunk's illegal, so is oral sex, what'll they ban next? Drugs? Odpowiedz Link
usenetposts Re: Statistics 23.03.06, 14:11 dandywarhol napisał: > More interesting: > Suicides per 100,000 people (data from 1999 mostly) > USA 21.7 > Canada (1998) 24.6 > Germany 27.5 > UK 15.1 (Good job on not topping yourselves!) > Australia 26.7 > Switzerland 36.5 > Sweden 27.7 > Austria 37.1 > New Zealand 30.6 > Japan 50.6 > I wonder what the correlation is between those stats and the Gini coefficient is? I had a headmaster - interestingly he commited suicide himself later on - who told me that in Cambridge there was one of the highest rates of suicide in the country, but it wasn't so much the students (although there is a tradition of closing off access to jumpable roofs for a few weeks after the exam results are published) as the townsfolk who tended to be responsible for that statistic. This made me think that depression is made worse when we see people around us who are succeeding, and we ourselves not part of that. If this were true, then there would be a direct negative correlation between the GINI coefficient and the stats above, but - without running a calculation, it seems that the correlation is only slight. More likely the cause is that countries with a very big well-to-do class which you really disgrace yourself with everyone you know if you fall out of are the worst case. If I look at the top countries on this list, like Japan or Sweden or Switzerland, then what they have in common is that most people are quite comfortably off - they even have good provision for the underpriveleged, but they probably are places where, if you hit on hard times, you can easily imagine yourself to be a failure. In England I think that people are a lot more philosophical about failure - you win some, you lose some, and also genuineley supportive of the underdog, and someone who hits hard times is unlikely to lose all his friends - we kind of regard that as fair weather friendship. I'm reading Lord Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries right now, and I am delighted to note that very few of his friends failed to stick by him during his period of disgrace. If you ask me, I think this is the best illustration of why we are at the bottom of the suicide league table, a very good place to be. Odpowiedz Link
varsovian Re: Right to bear arms - Polska 23.03.06, 12:08 I knew someone was going to say that! Odpowiedz Link