From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<< various provisos such as proof of competence and physical ability >>
Yes, Tim, but as soon as we get into these sensible-seeming measures which
you suggest are acceptable compromises, we get the ratcheting-up effect: it
is in the nature of politicians and bureaucrats to increase their powers of
restriction incrementally. For a start, who might judge my "fitness" to own
an M16 or a sub-gun? The police? They don't use automatic weapons, they shoot
the wrong people too often, they even shoot each other or themselves fairly
regularly, and their record of concern for individual liberty is not
encouraging. How about the army? Anyone who's had dealings with them over use
of military ranges knows they can be bureaucratic, slow, obstructive - and
alarmingly ignorant about firearms and ballistics outside the particular
weapons and calibres used by themselves.
I think New Zealand offers an illustration, where a liberalisation of
firearms laws has been followed by the standard knee-jerk calls for greater
(albeit practically futile & pointless) restrictions every time someone
commits a crime using a gun.
Again we come back to the fact that our "gun controls" stem from hasty, ill
conceived measures in 1920 that had nothing to do with gun crime and which
have spawned a subsequent morass of arbitrary restrictions which have almost
nothing to do with a reasonable, rational approach to keeping guns out of the
hands of undesirables. It's futile and self-defeating to play the
bureaucrats' game and pretend that there is some kind of happy medium of
control which will actually work, in the sense of reducing armed crime. Make
it an offence for convicted violent criminals to own guns if you like, but
beyond that, I say punish people if they commit crimes with guns, but
otherwise leave people alone.
Anthony Harrison
Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org
List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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