At 20:46 6-3-01 -0500, John Giorgis wrote:
>At 10:56 AM 3/6/01 +0100 J. van Baardwijk wrote:
> >Yes, mr. Bush, how many more innocent lives must be lost before the you
> >realize all these deaths are not mere statistics, but real tragedies that
> >could have been avoided... :(
>
>Avoided, Jeroen?
>
>Ramesh Ponnuru says it best:
>"A 15-year-old has been accused of killing two students and wounding 13
>others in yesterday's high-school shootings near San Diego. President
>Bush was right to label it "a disgraceful act of cowardice." But can the
>calls for more gun control be far behind? When they do arrive, keep in
>mind the number and range of California guns laws already on the books
>that may have been broken: A ban on minors possessing handguns except
>under parental supervision or with written permission; a similar ban on
>minors under the age of 16 possessing live ammunition; a ban on
>transferring guns to juveniles; a ban on concealing firearms without a
>license; a ban on storing loaded guns where children under the age of 16
>can access them outside of parental supervision; a ban on carrying guns
>on school grounds without the permission of school authorities; plus
>laws on registration, training, and waiting periods.
>
>In other words, what happened at Santana High School is a case of gun
>control failing."
>
>All your famous laws sure helped those kids an awful lot.
You can make laws all you want to ban anything you want, but that doesn't
solve the problem. In order for those laws to be effective, you need to
*enforce* them. I'm under the impression that *that* doesn't happen all
that much in the US. It seems to me that once you legally own a gun, you
are expected to handle it responsibly and store it in such a way that
nobody else can get access to it, but nobody checks if that is actually
done. It seems you can even "store" it on the dining room table, because
the government doesn't come to your house to see if you stored the gun safely.
Compare this to Dutch law: first, you can't just buy a gun and come back
six days later to pick it up -- here it takes 2-3 years before you can get
a permit; membership of a gun club is mandatory, as is regular practice.
Guns have to be stored in a locked, metal cabinet that has been bolted to
the wall; ammo also has to be stored in such a cabinet, but not in the same
room. You can expect a few visits per year from the police, who come to see
if your guns are stored safely. There is a zero-tolerance policy on that:
at the very first violation, you loose your gun and your permit, with
little or no chance of ever getting it back. Besides that, you can be fined
and or jailed.
IIRC, in the US most accidental deaths from guns, and most of those school
shootings, happen because kids had easy access to their parents' fire arms.
Most of those deaths could have been avoided if laws on gun ownership were
enforced more, with severe penalties when those laws are violated.
I know Americans hate government control, but the Dutch system of control
works: accidental gun-related deaths and shooting incidents are extremely
rare here.
Jeroen
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