[Vision2020] In Other Countries, Laws Are Strict and Work

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
December 17, 2012
In Other Countries, Laws Are Strict and Work

Like other shootings before it, the Newtown, Conn., tragedy has reawakened
America to its national fixation with firearms. No country in the world has
more guns per capita, with some 300 million civilian firearms now in
circulation <http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf>, or nearly one
for every adult.

Experts from the Harvard School of Public Health, using data from 26
developed countries, have
shown<http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html>that
wherever there are more firearms, there are more homicides. In the
case of the United States, exponentially more: the American murder rate is
roughly 15 times that of other wealthy countries, which have much tougher
laws controlling private ownership of guns.

There’s another important difference between this country and the rest of
the world. Other nations have suffered similar rampages, but they have
reacted quickly to impose new and stricter gun laws.

Australia is an excellent example. In 1996, a “pathetic social misfit,” as
a judge described the lone gunman, killed 35 people with a spray of bullets
from semiautomatic weapons. Within weeks, the Australian government was
working on gun reform laws that banned assault weapons and shotguns,
tightened licensing and financed gun amnesty and buyback programs.

At the time, the prime minister, John Howard, said, “We do not want the
American disease imported into Australia.” The laws have worked. The
American Journal of Law and Economics reported in 2010 that firearm
homicides in Australia dropped 59 percent between 1995 and 2006. In the 18
years before the 1996 laws, there were 13 gun massacres resulting in 102
deaths, according to Harvard
researchers<http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/files/bulletins_australia_spring_2011.pdf>,
with none in that category since.

Similarly, after 16 children and their teacher were killed by a gunman in
Dunblane, Scotland, in
1996<http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/18/world/scottish-inquiry-s-focus-why-strict-gun-law-failed.html>,
the British government banned all private ownership of automatic weapons
and virtually all handguns. Those changes gave Britain some of the toughest
gun control laws in the developed world on top of already strict rules.
Hours of exhaustive paperwork are required if anyone wants to own even a
shotgun or rifle for hunting. The result has been a decline in murders
involving firearms.

In Japan<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-guns-how-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/>,
which has very strict laws, only 11 people killed with guns in 2008,
compared with 12,000 deaths by firearms that year in the United States — a
huge disparity even accounting for the difference in population. As Mayor
Michael Bloomberg stressed on
Monday<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt-nEl55eXU&feature=player_embedded>while
ratcheting up his national antigun campaign, “We are the only
industrialized country that has this problem. In the whole world, the
*only*one.”

Americans do not have to settle for that.


*Read related editorials on gun control: rethinking
guns<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/the-gun-challenge-reason-for-hope.html>and
constitutional
issues<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/the-gun-challenge-second-amendment.html>
.*


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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