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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (39279)	3/16/2005 1:34:16 PM
From: fresc	Respond to of 173976

Good analogy! Qoute: <You're just as likely to get punched in the mouth in a bar in Sydney (Australia) as in a bar in Los Angeles. But you're 20 times as likely to be killed in Los Angeles."> Around the world, handgun registration and ownerlicensing are acknowledged as the most effective way to minimise handgun-related death and trauma. In almost every democracy, police see handgun registration as an essential crime-busting tool. There's nothing new in this. For more than sixty years, registration and owner licensing have been the accepted norm in two of the most established fields of crime and injury prevention - road safety and gun safety. In both of these, two parallel systems of accountability - that is, licensing the owner, and then registering the gun or the automobile - are closely linked and interdependent. It's the experience of many countries that neither measure works well without the other. Among the wealthier nations, the United States suffers the highest rate of firearm-related death. Even taking into account the recent update from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which showed a sharp decrease in firearm-related mortality, the American rate of gun death per head of population remains double that of Northern Ireland. So, how did our nations become so different? Sixty to seventy years ago, our nations took very different paths. In the 1930s, the United States decided to register all machine guns and license their owners. As a result of that stringent registration, machine guns are now the firearms least used in violence. But at the same time, the 54 members of the British Commonwealth, the nations of Europe and many others went a significant step further. We registered not just machine guns, but also handguns. In developed democracies outside the United States, six or seven decades of consistent firearm registration and owner licensing - in particular the registration of handguns- are recognised as the cornerstone of effective gun injury prevention. Nobody's pretending that we foreigners are any less violent than Americans. We're not. The big difference is in our levels of lethal violence. The eminent Californian criminologist Franklin Zimring put it this way: "You're just as likely to get punched in the mouth in a bar in Sydney (Australia) as in a bar in Los Angeles. But you're 20 times as likely to be killed in Los Angeles." Zimring goes on to suggest that the free availability of firearms - especially handguns in the United States - could have something to do with this disparity. It may also be worth noting that in the industrialized nations with lower levels of gun death than yours, the population is exposed to similar levels of media violence. So we might ask the question: if it's true that media violence makes guns desirable, how do all these countries differ in making guns available? Many countries have shown that a register of firearms acts to reduce the flow of guns from lawful owner to criminal. In Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, the computerised firearm registry is consulted thousands of times each day as a crime-busting tool. Our senior law enforcement officers agree; the more guns we have on the register, the more crimes police can solve and the more trauma we can prevent. To quote the President of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police: "Without information about who owns guns, there is no effective gun control. Opponents of gun control argue that the registration of firearms will not reduce crime. In fact, it is the position of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police that cost-effective registration is a key component of the new proposed gun control legislation. Registration will help ensure that gun owners are held accountable for their firearms and do not sell [them] illegally or give them to individuals without appropriate authorisation. It will also help ensure that guns are safely stored. Claiming that gun registration will not prevent crime is akin to claiming that registering cars does not prevent accidents." Every mass-produced gun which is used in violence began its life as a legal firearm in the hands of a lawful owner. Many of these guns "leak out" to criminals, either by unlawful sale, by theft or neglect. By introducing accountability all the way down the chain, a well-designed gun registry can greatly reduce this lethal leakage from lawful gun owner to criminal.