Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I think it's somewhat more likely to be related to the US's ludicrously lax laws on gun ownership. The murder rate in the US is 70x that of the UK, per head of population, and the overwhelming majority of those murders are carried out with guns. Gun crime happens in the UK, yes, but it's so rare that it's "headline news". In the US it seems to be so depressingly common that it's barely newsworthy.
The original justification for gun ownership in the US was in order to provide an "armed militia", in the days when the country had no standing army. What possible justification is there for it today?
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Wiki lists the intentional homicide rate of the US at 5.6 per 100,000 of population, and the UK at 2.03 per 100,000. Not sure if you were just throwing a number out to make a point.....and the US is still way too high.
Firearms account for 68% of the murders in the US,
according to the US Bureau of Justice. Oddly enough, the areas with the most strict gun laws (Washington DC, Detroit) also top the murder charts.
You could argue that the low crime rate in Switzerland is BECAUSE there is an assault rifle in every home. It must make would-be burglars nervous to break into a home with an armed and trained occupant.
And according to the founding fathers of the US, the real point of the right to bear arms (apart from defending the nation, ie the militia) was to enable the people to overthrow a tyrannical government or despot. They'd just fought a war for the rights of the people, and felt that the people should always have the ability to fight that war again if needed.