Monday, December 24, 2012

Well, well, well, that kind of trashes the 'strict gun laws will make us safe'

argument:
Contrary to widely-accepted national myths, public gun ownership is commonplace in most European states. It may appear to some outside observers—especially Americans—that Europeans have blindly surrendered their gun rights (Heston, 2002). The reality is that the citizens of most European countries are better armed than they realize. ...
Regulations tightly control gun ownership in only a few European countries like the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom. In much of the rest of the continent, public officials readily admit that unlicensed owners and unregistered guns greatly outnumberlegal ones. ...
"Greatly outnumber?” Just how greatly?
Well, says the Small Arms Survey, a research outfit established by the Swiss government, the United Kingdom, with just shy of 1.8 million legal firearms, has about four million illegal guns. Belgium, with about 458,000 legal firearms, has roughly two million illegal guns. In Germany, the number is 7.2 million legal guns and between 17 and 20 million off-the-books examples of things that go “bang” (a figure with which the German Police Union very publicly agrees). France, says the Survey, has 15-17 million unlawful firearms in a nation where 2.8 million weapons are held in compliance with the law.
 
 And this:
Small Arms Survey reports that, for Europe, illegal guns tend to flow from East to West. In need of the hard cash that black market dealings can provide, and suspicious of state power after decades of heavy-handed rule, Eastern Europe has become a major source for manufacturing and distributing illegal weapons—and of overall defiance of gun restrictions.
In central and eastern Europe, quiet resistance to over 40 years of socialist rule created a pervasive culture of non-cooperation with public authorities. When communism collapsed, leaving power to be inherited by weak and disorganized democratic regimes, innumerable opportunities arose for people to acquire and hide personal guns. It is no wonder that in much of the region registered guns appear to be the exception.
LOTS more at the link.  Pass it around.

Think about it: all those preening "We don't allow guns!" EUnuchs, and these are the real numbers. 
So if the EUnuchs can't disarm their own populations, with the laws they have, what the hell makes the politicians think it'll work here?

Oh, yeah: as Kevin says, "We have to do it again, only HARDER!"


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