Almost all handguns are

banned from civilian

possession, ownership,
purchase, or sale in the
United Kingdom as a
result of the Second
Firearms Act of 1997.
This was in response to
the Dunblane Massacre,
in which 43-year-old
Thomas Hamilton walked
into an elementary school and shot dead 16 children, aged six or younger,
and one teacher before killing himself. He used four handguns.
Now that modern handguns are no longer legal to have in the UK, let us
take a look at some murder rates. The rate for intentional homicide in the
UK in 1996the year of the Dunblane Massacrewas 1.12 per 100,000. It
was 1.24 in 1997, when the Firearms Act went into effect, and 1.43 in 1998.
The rate rose to a peak of 2.1 in 2002 and has fallen since to 1.23 as of
2010. It cannot be denied that the rate of homicides via guns has fallen
dramatically since Dunblane, but the rate of murders has gone up. To say
these higher numbers are the result of fewer people able to arm
themselves for defense is drastically jumping to a conclusion, but the fact
does remain that more people are killing each other in the UK today than
when guns were legal to have.

An assault rifle is
any weapon which
fires high-powered
rifle rounds rather
than pistol rounds,
semi or fully
automatically. The
weapon reloads
each round on its
ownall you have
to do is pull the
trigger again and
again. It is true that these weapons were invented for the purpose of
warfare, not hunting, though they can be used for either. Proponents of
even limited gun control maintain that, if nothing else is done, assault rifles
should have magazines of no more than 10 rounds at a time.
Gun control opponents, however, have long argued that the Second
Amendment was put in place not just for ordinary home defense against
burglars but specifically to guarantee that the nation could never be
overcome by any military power foreign or domestic. If the five branches of
the US military were beaten by, say, a nuclear holocaust, the only national
defense left would be the civilians themselves. Any subsequent military
invasionprobably armed with AK-47 variantswould find it very easy to
overrun civilians armed only with lever, bolt, and pump action weapons.

The first modern school

shooting occurred on
August 1, 1966 and
deservedly made
national headlines
because no one had
ever heard of such
insanity. A young man at
the University of Texas
used a sniper rifle to
shoot innocent random
strangers from up to
400 yards for 90
minutes. The Austin
police found themselves woefully outgunned at the outset.
They were considerably aided, in Ramiro Martinezs opinion, by several
dozen students and passersby who did not take cover, but instead ran to
their vehicles and brought back hunting rifles. They then took cover
alongside police officers and opened fire on the observation deck, forcing
Whitman to take cover and fire less often and less accurately. Martinez was
one of the three officers who entered the tower and killed Whitman, and he
thanked the civilians for their assistance. Whitman may have killed many
more than 12 from the 28th story observation deck had he not been harried
by the civilians return fire.

A German high school

student initiated a

rampage on March 11 2009 Winnenden, Baden-Wurttemberg, in

southwestern Germany.
Seventeen-year-old Timothy Kretschmer began at Albertville-Realschule,
where he murdered 12 people, most of them women, then carjacked Igor
Wolf and forced him to drive Kretschmer to the town of Wendlingen. While
in the backseat, Kretschmer reloaded his magazines and answered Wolfs
question of why he had done it. For fun. Because its fun. He ordered Wolf
off the road near a car dealership and ran inside, murdered two more
people, and then shot it out with the police, wounding two and being
wounded in both legs. He opened fire on every random person he could
see, then shot himself.
He killed 15 and wounded nine, all with a single 9mm pistol. This was his
fathers gun, since he was too young to own one, and it was the only gun
his father had not locked in a safe. He had illegally kept it out and loaded in
case of burglary. This is not illegal in the US. Here, we see that a child, who
should not have been able to acquire a gun, did so in a nation with
extremely strict laws on gun control.

Most
Americans do
not trust their
government, or
more properly,
the people who
hold the
highest
positions in it.
This was the
feeling long

before Edward Snowden leaked proof of the government spying illegally on

its own citizens and nations around the world. Snowden deemed this too
similar to Big Brother, as Orwell calls it, but the US government not only
disagreed with him, it even defended what it was doing as not in any way
criminal, though its own law books clearly differ. Snowden is not without
supporters. Twitter has erected security firewalls to guard against NSA
spying, and Google, Facebook, and Tumblr have followed suit.
Pro-gun citizens consider their guns the same protection. They arm
themselves for the possibility of government agents taking away their rights
one by one until they live in a police state in which the government is able
to do anything it wants because the civilian populace is unarmed and
cannot resist. In these terms, any gun control is viewed as a threat to
liberty, and though the Constitution guarantees rights, it does not enforce
anything. Guns do.
If rampage killers are so
depressed that they intend
to kill themselves afterward,
then why hasnt anyone
whipped out an assault rifle
and attempted to kill people
inside the US Bullion
Depository near Fort Knox?
Do these shooters fear the
firepower lurking around the
gold? Not if they want to die, but what they do fear is not killing a lot of
people beforehand. They have a rage in them, and it appears to be always
the same. Motive or not, they want to exact revenge. The more dead, the
merrier.

It cant be done at the White House or a police station, but malls, schools,
ordinary workplaces, and churches are all soft and rich targets because
they contain many people and few of them are armed.
Suppose there were a guarantee that everyone in a church on Sunday
morning were armed to the teethpistols, shotguns, and assault rifles, and
more importantly, that they were all trained to fight back. Even the most
desperately depressed rage-a-holic would pick a different target. The
Amarillo school district in the good ol state of Texas has gone to the
extreme of arming its entire faculty and staff as a warning to would-be
maniacs. This means the teachers, janitors, groundskeepers, and
secretaries all have guns on their person

This amendment
prohibited the
production, transport,
and sale of alcohol
within the United States
of America. Most of the
politicians in
Washington, DC
strongly supported the
imposition of the ban,
but when it went into
effect on January 17,
1920, the public
responded in a way the politicians hadnt expectedfew people heeded
the criminalization, and those who had been manufacturing alcohol
continued doing so regardless of the law. Alcohol use flourished even more
than before. The police around the country were woefully ineffective in
curbing its production, sale, or consumption.
Career criminals like Al Capone became extremely rich by gaining control
over the importation to entire cities. Those too afraid of the police resorted
to making their own booze at home, and this resulted in many deaths from
poisoning.
Replace every reference to alcohol above with a reference to guns and you
have the most assured aftermath of a similar prohibition on gunsexcept
in this scenario, the crimes involved are much deadlier.

Gun laws are all founded on

the principle of making a
nation safer by limiting its
civilian populations access to
guns, but laws against
murder and violence do not
apply to those who have
given up on life and intend to
die while killing as many
people as they can. Laws
against theft do not apply to a
person who intends to steal something. The sole thing the criminallyminded care about is not getting caught. Some are reformed in prison, but
in large part, those who want to break a law are not going to feel remorse
when they are caught. Give them a chance and they will do it again.
From this perspective, it is difficult to fathom the logic of enacting newer,
stricter gun laws on an already lawful society. Most of us obey such laws.
Sale of guns is forbidden within the city limits of Chicago, an ordinance that
went into effect in 2010. For the year 2013, the citys murder count is 374.
There were 432 in 2010 and 500 in 2012. The FBI has named Chicago the
nations murder capital. Thus, the city ordinance did nothing to reduce its
murder rate.

Let us disentangle
ourselves from the trees
and take a look at the
forest. Because there is no
national gun registry, the
exact number of guns in
civilian hands in the US
cannot be determined, but
an estimate places the total
number of weapons in US
civilian hands at 310 million
as of 2009. By today, that means almost 1 gun for every single citizen,
including infants. What would gun control even mean at this point? Assume
this federal law: from 2014 on, no more assault rifles. Those who already
own one may keep theirs, but such weapons will disappear from gun stores
and pawn shops. Have we controlled much of anything? There are still at
least 3 million assault rifles out there.
In a perfect world, gun control would mean going house to house
throughout the nation and taking away every single firearm, including
muzzle loaders. That would be impossible. Thus, to debate gun control is a
futile exercise. They cannot be controllednot anymore. The continuation
of buying and selling them cannot make the situation any worse because
criminals will never again have to go far to find one.