advise on fighting the handgun bann

[jcbruno]

hi all i thought i would ask this question because Canadian gun owners may soon have to defend our

pass time there is a strong movement here to ban all pistols and semiauto rifles, our current conservative government is saying they wont do it and infact is trying to abolish the long gun registry here in Canada that would include all hunting type bolt,semiauto,leaver,pump guns but would keep all pistols and military type semiauto guns registerd which i think is a good compromise. canadian pro gun groups often quote the british handgun bann as a example of how restricting legal use is a waste of time and money to no effect on gun crime.

 

can i ask how did your government go about it and how long did it take to come into effect?

the reason i ask is our parliment is identicle to yours and all bills have to be passed in the house of commons with the final royal stamp, any good advise on what didnt work and what you would do differnt if you could fight it again any advise greatly apreciated.

[Catamong]

Don't look to us for advice - most UK shooting organisations stuck their heads in the sand and hoped the problem would go away, instead of mounting a co-ordinated campaign to keep lawfully owned handguns.

 

The end result was a ban, and now there are more illegal handguns in circulation than ever before, with gun crime now at an all time high.

 

Cat

[Cranfield]

The Dunblane massacre was on 13th March 1996, within 18 months all private ownership of handguns was illegal (some small calibre weapons were added slightly later).

 

Remember we were never permitted to own handguns for personal protection, so these were mainly competition target pistols.

 

Legal gun ownership in the UK is now very strongly controlled. Current regulations mean that to own a gun a person has to go through a process of criminal record checks, providing character references, filling in a form, applying for a licence, and demonstrating they have a locked gun cupboard to keep it safe. Each gun and owner is registered and known to the police.

Licences have to be produced to purchase ammunition and all weapon transactions have to be notified to the police and the details put on the individuals certificate.

 

As is usual, the burden of compliance is on the decent and law abiding citizens.

The law breakers buy and use illegal guns, traded on the streets.

 

Regulating the largely and wholly law abiding, cannot stop the law breakers. If someone does not care about breaking the law regarding murder, robbery or assault on someone, they certainly will not worry that they are breaking gun control laws.

 

Between 1997 and 2003, gun crime in the UK nearly doubled and there has been an average of 6% increase per year since 2003.

 

Catamong is right, no UK shooting organisations took up the fight against the Governments knee-jerk reaction to the terrible events in Dunblane.

[the last engineer]

my understanding is that the guns were never banned as such, but private ownership was, this would leave all handguns at known ranges where bad guys could go shopping, therefore all clubs decided not to be held accountable either and banned the storage of said guns.

 

one of those catch 22's the government like " dammend if you do, dammend if you dont" "seeing you cant have them(private) and they cant store them(clubs) i guess no-one needs them, all gone now.

 

from my understanding here, having the majority of the population living over on the east side, packed into their city and suburb life styles, none living the country life that envelopes the majority of the country, you have a very biased aproach to firearms, "why you need a rifle in the city there boy" " what you doing with that semi auto son" oooo thats dangerous isnt it?.

 

this kind of blatant ignorence, the lack of understanding, and failure to educate is all at fault, it breeds fear and revulsion, this in turn brings contempt and uneeded/unwanted control from people who have no idea of what they are fighting.

 

i have no problem with registration, i have no problem with regulation, as long as its across the board, im sick and tired of hearing the cops and the councils and the pig ignorent politicians tell me they cant stop the runaway gun problem, so to stop them we want to stop all of you, ********e, get on it, as cranners said get your heads out of the sand and find the solution, if you can put half a billion to some goofed up muslin dyslexic lefty/righty stopy proby, then put it where it counts, and add more cops, control borders, punish the snot out of the muppets you catch (10 years should do it) get the public on your side and show what your going to do and stand by it.

 

 

ppppssssststtttttttttttttt ,,,,,,,,,,,,,, slowly venting steam now so going for a coffee to settle down, jesus it gets my back up.

 

 

 

Martin

 

p.s. i think the smart/special people in Quebec have now banned semi auto shotguns,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, something about them being dangerous,,,,,, no ****e sherlock,so is a baseball bat, rolling pin, shovel, car with drunk **** at the wheel, bus driver cutting hard right across traffic, wake up people..............................

[Peter_HMR]

Handguns used to be banned in ireland and were only brought in about two years ago dont have to much details but will pm the address of an irish forum where you might be able to find answers.

 

But from what i can see its quite simple-

 

before (while handguns were banned) there was lots of illegal guns and gun deaths

after (while handguns could be legally aquired) there are lots of illegal guns and gun deaths but no deaths from legally held guns.

 

so bannin them does nothing it just denies legitimate sports people the right to practice there sport in there own country

[rarms]

Peter, I don't imagine we will ever see anything like that in the UK. That would mean admitting they were wrong!

 

 

Watch and weep

 

http://www.weaponvideos.org/viewvideo/259/...n_the_UK__NRA_/

[Wookie]

You have to also figure in the "homeland defence" theory into this:

 

If something bad happen (Dunblane, The Twin Towers) then the government will react to this and do something about it (ban legally owned handguns, fight terror etc). Everyone that opposes this move ca, and probably will, get accused of not caring about the act that causes it in the first place. The people that oppose this can, and probably will, then retract their opposition because they do not want to be held accountable if the same thing happens again.

 

The net result is that the status quo will continue to exist for anyone that is not law abiding, but that people that are law abiding will get shafted (for want of a better word) and their civil liberties will get eroded as more laws/adjustments get brought in under the same set of starting conditions. I hate to draw parallels, but you only have to look at how far both the US and the UK have changed since the Dunblane massacre (one psychotic individual with weapons) and the Twin Towers (fundamentalists). The UK is now the most heavily monitored country in the world with CCTV and _still_ we have more of our freedom at risk.

 

As just about everyone has said before, illegal gun crime is causing the problem here and I would say that damn near 100% of legal license holders are scared about putting a toe wrong (let alone a foot) in case they lose their weapons. We can't defend ourselves if attacked in the street because our guns may get taken away. Just about any type of offence could cause the police to re-think our need, or motives, for holding a firearms or shotgun license.

 

Unfortunately, we do not have a written constitution to protect our ability to own firearms and America has far too powerful a firearms lobby to ever have that ammendment taken away. Rest assured that if Gordon Brown does try and write a constitution, it will be useless and outdated the second it gets written, but will still be used to beat the ordinary man (middle class, law abiding etc) round the head.

 

Wookie

[jcbruno]

the unfortunate thing is that most of the gun crime is imigrant gang youth and yes the odd white trash redneck hilibilli goe *** over tea kettle but for the % population of imigrants they have a high % of criminals and prison population politically corect or not i did a little research and it seems that is the way it is in most of the western countries i wish we could just close our doors on imigration and only allow free movement to friendlywestern nations and we could slowley get our civil liberties back but i think it will have to get much worse before anthing like that happens is there any hope

[al4x]

the unfortunate thing is that most of the gun crime is imigrant gang youth and yes the odd white trash redneck hilibilli goe *** over tea kettle but for the % population of imigrants they have a high % of criminals and prison population politically corect or not i did a little research and it seems that is the way it is in most of the western countries i wish we could just close our doors on imigration and only allow free movement to friendlywestern nations and we could slowley get our civil liberties back but i think it will have to get much worse before anthing like that happens is there any hope

 

 

Personally I think the best system is one of licensing with good record checks and from that point of view the Licensing system for shotguns and rifles in the UK does mostly work. Crime with legally held weapons is pretty low.

Unregistered and illegally imported guns are another matter and crimes are increasing rapidly, I do wonder if this would be even faster if they could nip down the supermarket and buy whatever they wanted and my belief is it would be. From that point I reckon you should push for a licensing system whereby if you have the need to use weapons you can assuming you pass the required checks but so that criminals with no prior convictions can't just buy guns with few checks. With our system it takes months to get licensed what criminal would bother