Right to bear arms - Polska

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
    • 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.
      • 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
        • 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.
          • 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.
            • 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.
              • 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?
          • 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.
    • ianek70 Re: Right to bear arms - Polska 23.03.06, 10:58
      I've got bare arms, look.
      • varsovian Re: Right to bear arms - Polska 23.03.06, 12:08
        I knew someone was going to say that!
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