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RE: I Work in a Gun Store. Here's What I Wish People Knew About American Gun Culture
Very informative for those like me that come from another country. The media does portray the American people as just a little(!) crazy with their guns. In South Africa it is only possible to obtain a gun permit with great difficulty. Most ordinary people don't have one. The criminals have tons.
It makes sense that the criminals would have tons of guns. Criminals don't, by nature, follow laws, after all. And none of their law-abiding targets have guns to defend themselves. I hope that, as the gun rights battle rages on here in the U.S., some other countries will experiment with loosening their own gun restrictions. Especially those with high crime rates, so that ordinary people will have a means to protect themselves.
Australia used to have a high crime rate involving guns and then they banned guns after a particularly heinous crime some years ago. It's now one of the safest countries in the world.
Australia's gun ban only netted an estimated 20% of the privately owned firearms in that country. And Australia only had a few hundred thousand guns to begin with. Imagine if the U.S. instituted a similar (mandatory) buyback program, and only netted 20% of our over 300 million privately owned firearms. What a folly that would be. First off, the only people who would comply with such a ban would be people with crappy guns sitting around the house that they didn't want anymore. No one is going to take their valuable guns down to the police station and turn them over for a check worth less than half the value. Especially not Americans, whose right to bear arms is enshrined in their country's founding documents and deeply sown into the fabric of their culture. So, such a ban would turn 41% of households into criminals in one fell swoop. And you can be certain that the real criminals (the violent ones) are not going to be giving up their guns. So there would be literally no impact on actual crime rates, just a whole new class of non-violent criminals where none existed before.
Further, Australia was already one of the safest countries in the world prior to their gun ban. Eight or nine shootings over the course of five years, with a handful of victims apiece is not an out of control crime problem.
I think you are misinformed. The statistics and data clearly show that gun violence is UNCHANGED since the gun ban in your country.