Tuesday, October 24, 2006
FIRE, BUT NO FIREARMS
French presidential aspirant Nicolas Sarkozy—whose hard-line response to violence we’re always hearing about—takes the usual soft Euro line on gun ownership:
I am against the private ownership of firearms, and I’m trying to make you think about that. If you are assaulted by an armed burglar, he’ll use his weapon more effectively than you anyway so you’re risking your life. If the criminal is not armed and you are and you shoot, your life will be ruined, because killing someone over a theft is not in line with the republican values that are mine. The private ownership of firearms is dangerous. I understand your exasperation for having been burglarized two times, I understand the fear that your wife and daughter may have but the answer is in the efficiency of the police and the efficiency of the judiciary process, the answer is not in having guns at home.
Let’s see ... 10,000 cars incinerated and 300 buildings attacked last year, plus 112 cars torched and 15 police set upon every day so far in 2006. That’s French police efficiency for you. On the subject of guns, a new report is out:
Australia’s guns buyback has not reduced rates of gun murder or suicide, a new study says.
The paper, published in the British Journal of Criminology and written by pro-gun lobbyists Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran, found the buyback of 640,000 guns at a cost of some $500 million failed to make Australia safer.
No great surprise here; most all of those required to hand in their weapons were law-abiding folk. Note, by the way, the second-par prominence in that AAP piece given to the report’s pro-gun background. Contrast that with coverage of Lancet’s Iraq mortality guess, which largely omitted any mention of study co-author Dr. Les Roberts’ anti-war activism and Democrat candidature.