I am going to talk about an article that was in the March Journal of Medicine, which is the publication of the Georgia Association of Medicine [David B. Kopel, "The Allure of Foreign Gun Laws"]….
In it he talks about countries that have strict gun control laws and what it has meant in terms of the crime rate…. Today you cannot own a gun or rifle in Japan. You can own a shotgun only through very rigorous licensing laws. Is it a safe country? It certainly is a safe country. They have a very low crime rate. What does that mean? Maybe if we look at it at first glance, get rid of the guns and you get rid of the crime problem, if you only look at the law and the crime rate.
… Switzerland … actually has a lower murder rate than Japan. They have strict gun control laws, but in a completely different way. Every male in Switzerland has to join the militia. If you are between the age of twenty and fifty and you are male, you are a member of the militia. You spend three or four weeks per year training, and as part of your duty in the militia you are given a fully automatic assault rifle which you take home. You do not leave that at the National Guard armory for weekend duties. You do not pick it up for your three weeks of summer training. You take that home to suburban Zurich or wherever you live and keep it at home. Every male must be proficient in marksmanship. Every male between the ages of twenty and fifty will get tested on marksmanship.
In a country which is about two-thirds the size of West Virginia, there are over three thousand shooting ranges. Ammunition, while we have one proposal right now to tax it, is subsidized in Switzerland. To get a handgun or rifle, there is a very easy permitting process. Just about any adult can get one. You can get an anti-tank gun, anti-aircraft gun, and you can buy some types of cannons. This is just the folks on the street.
I would submit that they are not more responsible, they are not safer, and they are not smarter, but what they do have in Switzerland, and they also have in Japan, is a strong family structure, tightly knit communities, and good relationships from generation to generation. In short, in these two countries culturally young people are socialized into noncriminal behavior….
If we just superficially kid ourselves and say we are going to get rid of the guns, we are going to get rid of the problems, the statistics do not show that at all. They show it to be a cultural socializing process which we are not doing a good job at in America, particularly in the inner cities, where we have the highest murder rates.
In Britain, they have very tough gun control laws. They have had those … for about thirty or forty years … despite that, in a country where only four percent of the households legally have guns, their murder rates are higher now than they were before the strict gun control laws went into effect.
Let us talk about Jamaica because one of the things we hear so often from Second Amendment proponents is that you are not necessarily owning a gun to defend yourself against a burglar, but you are doing it to defend yourselves against the government.
In 1974, Jamaica enacted very strict gun control laws, which include house-to-house searches randomly, secret trials, detention, incommunicado, mandatory life sentences for possession of a single bullet, very strict gun control laws. What happened? Violent crime dropped significantly for about six months, but then, within a year, it went back up to the level it was before the gun control laws, and in fact has been increasing since.
What is the most significant is that one-third of the murders in Jamaica were perpetrated by the police. Think about that in terms of the Second Amendment people who are saying, [people] "have to worry about the government, not just the burglar." … Why is it that police can have guns, but you and I and the average American citizen cannot?
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