Quote:
Originally Posted by cgjackson222
Switzerland and Australia are two countries we could learn a lot from in terms of reducing gun violence.
Switzerland has over 2 million guns (about .25 guns for every citizen) and guns are very important to them culturally (they have a large shooting contest for 13-18 year olds each year, and see gun ownership as a patriotic way to guard against potential invasions) but hasn't had a mass shooting since 2001 and often have less than 50 gun related homicides per year in a country with over 8 million people.
Specific laws that reduce gun violence in Switzerland include:
1) Gun sellers follow strict licesning procedures : Gun permits are doled out locally and they keep a log of everyone who owns a gun in their region in what they call a "canton." Cantonal police don't take their duty doling out gun licenses lightly. They might consult a psychiatrist or talk with authorities in other cantons where a prospective gun buyer has lived to vet the person.
2) Violent people or those with substance abuse issues can't have guns: People who've been convicted of a crime or have an alcohol or drug addiction aren't allowed to buy guns in Switzerland.
Those who "expresses a violent or dangerous attitude" also can't own a gun.
Gun owners who want to carry their weapon for "defensive purposes" also have to prove they can properly load, unload, and shoot their weapon and must pass a test to get a license.
3) The Swiss banned the use of automatic weapons, silencers, laser sights, and heavy machine guns.
https://www.businessinsider.com/swit...-deaths-2018-2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjlT4BME2aE
Australia had a mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996 in which 35 people died.
The Australian Government, then led be a Conservative named John Howard pushed through strict gun laws 12 days later.
The laws: 1) Banned semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns and rifles from civilian possession.
2) Forced people to provide a legitimate reason to own a gun, and to wait 28 days to buy a firearm.
3) Had a massive mandatory buyback of guns, resulting in the confiscation and destruction of about 700,000 guns reducing gun-owning households by half.
Australia has had only 1 mass shooting since 1996, and gun violence has been reduced by over half.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Arc3c8Pc8 |
The problem here is that these figures given do not address what the rates and trends were before the bans - only looking at after the bans. That can't tell us much.
Switzerland
I looked up such incidents in these nations, by using a common search. I'm not claiming a masters thesis here. Switzerland has had 5 massacres since 1900 (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...in_Switzerland). One in 1912, 1932 (a police shooting on protestors incident, not really the same thing as we are discussing here as the State is exempted from gun regulations across the world and in every serious proposal I have ever seen), 1976, 2001, and 2015.
So we have had 1 in the 21 years since their 2001 ban you discussed. They had last had one 25 years before the ban. Before that one in 1976, it had really been since 1912 that this happened. We have 4 real incidents, 2 before, the 1 precipitating the ban, and one after the ban. This is a truly tiny sample size, but nothing here suggests that gun control laws have reduced massacres (technically they are up after the ban, but with a sample of 1 that is just as garbage data)
The homicide rate appears to have declined after the ban. It was also declining before the ban though, as it was in most places in the first world during this period.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countrie...-homicide-rate. It does not looks like this reduced the murder rate.
The laser sight provision seems odd to me as a shooter - it is about the least efficient method of target acquisition that exists. Old school iron sights are faster to get on target than a laser in most use cases.
Australia
There's too many in Australia to list every one as I did in Switzerland. 1996 was 26 years ago, so splitting into blocks that size and counting off the list by hand (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...in_Australia):
1969-1995: 20
1996: 2
1997-2022: 37
It does not seem to me that this ban has reduced massacres whatsoever. Massacres have almost doubled since the ban. I doubt that has anything whatsoever to do with the ban, but the data pretty clearly tells us it has not reduced massacres (or if it has, something else has happened that more than offsets its effect and made things worse).
The overall homicide rate follows the first world global trend, it goes up some years, down some years, but the overall is a downward glide (a very good thing). This glide did not begin with the ban. It's about flat on the whole from 1995-2000 (1998 was a good year, 1999 a bad year). Again, the data does not suggest that this ban saved lives.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countrie...-homicide-rate