X-Ftn-To: Jeffrey C. Dege 

jdege@jdege.visi.com (Jeffrey C. Dege) wrote:
>On Thu, 07 Jun 2001 19:39:49 +0200, Danijel Turina  wrote:
>>I'm from Croatia, and I know a thing or two about the proliferation of
>>weapons; before the war, there were practically no weapons on the
>>streets; now, the mafia clans are actually shooting it out on the
>>streets, sometimes not even with guns, but with "Wasps"[1]. 
>
>And if they hadn't been able to obtain weapons, things would have been
>peacable?

Definitely so, because that's how it used to be while the guns were
extremely hard to find. Almost no gun accidents, and no street
shootouts. When somebody actually waved a gun, the police was all over
him so fast that he was in jail before he could figure out what's
going on. In the States, there are so many guns around that the police
simply cannot intervene properly, so, this "self-protection" thing
actually incapacitates the police and makes people even more
vulnerable.

>In a world with violent lunatics, gun control doesn't work.  

You would be surprized. I remember times here when violent lunatics
were dreaming about having a gun, but actually getting one was totally
out of the question - the chance of getting caught was bad enough, but
being a man with a gun in a country without guns makes you such a good
target for police that you cannot believe.

>In a world of peacable people, gun control isn't necessary.

This is a sophism. Owning guns is a psychology thing: people feel
unsafe and they buy a gun and then the others feel threatened and buy
guns and the only result is that less people feel safe, and there's
more feeling of being threatened. However, if the general population
doesn't have any weapons, then the job becomes very easy for the
police, because those who _do_ have guns are always the dangerous
criminals who are often shot on sight. When the police does that, the
general population feels very safe and nobody needs guns, because they
know that the crime problem is under control. This is what I call a
civilized country. In an uncivilized country, the issue of
self-defense isn't regulated on the level of the society but on the
individual level. This is not a safe world at all, which caused people
to organize and pay a police force that would defend them, so that
they wouldn't have to own and use weapons. I hope that America will at
one point evolve to this stage.

-- 
Homepage: http://www.danijel.org