Guns,guns, and more Guns

[TRITON]

It's clear you dont understand it. Of course alcohol and marijuana are both addictive and harmful for society however, in the case with both by and large people can control their intake and majority never become addicted. For hard drugs like heroin it's a different scenario.

I agree tobacco is both harmful and addictive but you can't put it in the same conversation as heroin, that's naive

Clearly I dont understand it and only you in the whole wide world can
Have you personal experience of taking (smoking/injecting) heroin ? or is your experience just 'natural'

Tobacco is addictive, so people arent really controlling their intake, its controlling them.
Alcohol is addictive and highly disorientating. People in a state of drunkenness arent in control, in fact they've lost control.
Marijuana is habit forming and most smoking it will continue to smoke it come hell or high water. While the addictiveness of it isnt as strong as tobacco or other drugs, it does clearly have an addictive nature, to which there are withdrawal symptoms. So again its not a case of people controlling it,but of it controlling them.
Heroin is addictive, and has strong withdrawal effects. But like all three above its not instantly addictive, and to become problematic you need to keep taking it, much like with tobacco or alcohol or even marijuana.

So on to danger. Smoking kills 78,000, alcohol kills 9000, heroin kills 2000
Most dangerous drug isnt heroin mate.

 

[bansobaby]

Is it gesture politics?

every country with strict gun controls has low gun violence.

Wrong. Mexico has strict gun controls.

 

[Blackswanwood]

The point on gun controls is whether they are effective or not. Clearly in Mexico they are not as the border with the US is porous.

https://www.latimes.com/
I think the U.K. has broadly got it right for our circumstances. Police who carry firearms are highly trained and don’t swagger around like Robocop. Gun crime is thankfully relatively low and the response when it does happen is robust. Arguably knife crime is more of an issue.

I also agree with a point made earlier that trying to draw conclusions based on what happens in the US is flawed as the circumstances (history, geography, attitudes, legal system etc) are so different. However the bodycam footage on the news yesterday of the LA Police Officers dealing with a report of an assault in a shop was quite sobering. While we may not have the full story I’d rather have our approach to gun ownership and policing.

 

[clogs]

Nobody has mentioned S. Africa yet.....
I've lived and worked in both the US and S.A......
America being far safer.......
I was heavily armed in Africa as it was comp nec...oftenworking in the bush.....
my idea was if I'm gonna get taken out I'll take as many intruders with me as poss....
g-day

 

[RobinBHM]

Wrong. Mexico has strict gun controls.

Shall we address the Mexico example?

Mexico has had strict gun laws since the 70s

until around the mid 2000s gun crime was low

and then guns started being smuggled in from America, feeding Mexicans drug war.

70% of gun violence in Mexico is committed with American guns


So effectively Mexico has weak gun laws



Do you think it’s easy to smuggle in guns to the UK?

 

[sploo]

my idea was if I'm gonna get taken out I'll take as many intruders with me as poss....
g-day

Here's the issue with humans though: I broadly agree with you, but the reality is that you were probably statistically more likely to have shot yourself than ever tackled an intruder.

For the same reasons, people smoke and play the lottery... because I won't get lung cancer, and I'll win big one day; but the numbers clearly say the opposite. We humans ain't great at understanding the odds.

 

[Terry - Somerset]

Do you think it’s easy to smuggle in guns to the UK?

Very easy. Felixstowe handles 4m containers (20ft equivalents) each year (~ 48% of UK total). Other freight through the channel ports - Dover alone currently handles about 6000 HGVs per day (4m pa).

That they can all be searched is implausible - detection must rely upon intelligence and/or identification of anomalies. The real question is (a) where are weapons sourced (Eastern Europe, Middle East?), and (b) how they get loaded on to a superficially "normal" shipment. Organised crime has no real difficulty with drugs, counterfeit goods, even people etc - why should a few guns pose a problem.

As an aside, many decades ago I worked for a UK company which provided a middle east outfit with components for assembly, shipped on 40ft containers. Warehouse staff would routinely load a few cases of wine and spirits before filling the rest of the container with said components. Never exposed!

 

[sploo]

Very easy. Felixstowe handles 4m containers (20ft equivalents) each year (~ 48% of UK total). Other freight through the channel ports - Dover alone currently handles about 6000 HGVs per day (4m pa).

That they can all be searched is implausible - detection must rely upon intelligence and/or identification of anomalies. The real question is (a) where are weapons sourced (Eastern Europe, Middle East?), and (b) how they get loaded on to a superficially "normal" shipment. Organised crime has no real difficulty with drugs, counterfeit goods, even people etc - why should a few guns pose a problem.

As an aside, many decades ago I worked for a UK company which provided a middle east outfit with components for assembly, shipped on 40ft containers. Warehouse staff would routinely load a few cases of wine and spirits before filling the rest of the container with said components. Never exposed!

I do get the impression that a lot of big drug busts (and presumably also other illegal goods) are more the work of investigations into the people running the operation than random searches of containers (so a few cases of booze would not be of interest).

I recall reading something a while back that Belgium had become a major center for illegal weapons shipping, but I can't remember if that was crime or terror related.

As for the UK, there are certainly guns on our streets but they do seem to be relatively rare. Whether that's down to tough rules/sentencing or good controls on illegal imports I don't know.

 

[sploo]

Ah yea, here's the article: Paris attacks: Is Belgium Europe's favourite gun shop?

I didn't know that Belgium used to have lax gun laws. Beer and chocolate would have been my guess

 

[Spectric]

How many guns would be removed from the streets if there was no drug syndicates, is the gun not just a tool of the drug dealers. If you think of drugs as a commodity that can generate huge wealth then you can see why places like mexico have such a high level of gun related deaths, it is just the cartels securing business interest. They also probably have the mexican police on their payroll as well. Maybe in the UK the gangs control their interest by bribery and corruption instead, so even though it is easy to aquire weapons in the UK maybe they are actually trying to avoid that path because the ones at the top are or feel untouchable and have so much money that people can just be paid to take holidays in HM's camps knowing they will still get more cash than they could legally earn working.

 

[Jacob]

...... people can just be paid to take holidays in HM's camps knowing they will still get more cash than they could legally earn working.

How do you apply for this? I could do with a break.

 

[Spectric]

You just need to be in that game and not a nice woodworker !

 

[bansobaby]

Shall we address the Mexico example?

Mexico has had strict gun laws since the 70s

until around the mid 2000s gun crime was low

and then guns started being smuggled in from America, feeding Mexicans drug war.

70% of gun violence in Mexico is committed with American guns


So effectively Mexico has weak gun laws



Do you think it’s easy to smuggle in guns to the UK?

Nice sidestep, are you in politics?

 

[sploo]

Nice sidestep, are you in politics?

I didn't read Robin's post as a sidestep, but it does bring up an important point that a leaky border (and significant corruption) means that strict guns laws become effectively moot.

 

[GregW]

Very easy. Felixstowe handles 4m containers (20ft equivalents) each year (~ 48% of UK total). Other freight through the channel ports - Dover alone currently handles about 6000 HGVs per day (4m pa).

That they can all be searched is implausible - detection must rely upon intelligence and/or identification of anomalies. The real question is (a) where are weapons sourced (Eastern Europe, Middle East?), and (b) how they get loaded on to a superficially "normal" shipment. Organised crime has no real difficulty with drugs, counterfeit goods, even people etc - why should a few guns pose a problem.

As an aside, many decades ago I worked for a UK company which provided a middle east outfit with components for assembly, shipped on 40ft containers. Warehouse staff would routinely load a few cases of wine and spirits before filling the rest of the container with said components. Never exposed!

When contraband on international level is being found, unless direct threat, attics going throw, and than suddenly drivers having frequent coincidental stops while driving to local Tesco. Several times a week. Their phone loosing signal, they seen the same people asking them for direction on petrol station carpark.

no one cares for several cases of wine…

 

[RobinBHM]

Nice sidestep, are you in politics?

I stand by my claim that countries with tough gun laws have low gun violence, Mexico is an outlier because it has a leaky border with a lax neighbour.

 

[D_W]

I stand by my claim that countries with tough gun laws have low gun violence, Mexico is an outlier because it has a leaky border with a lax neighbour.

It's a bit errant to assume that the 30% of guns that come from elsewhere to cartels wouldn't just come from eastern europe or china. What didn't really help was an intentional program under the Obama administration to try to sell guns to mexico on purpose just to see where they went. Though, I doubt that was a majority of anything - it was just dippy.

The reason for problems with mexico go beyond a lax neighbor- they're related to money flow and the inability of the government to topple cartels (and in some cases, the money is probably partially flowing to the government).

 

[bansobaby]

I stand by my claim that countries with tough gun laws have low gun violence, Mexico is an outlier because it has a leaky border with a lax neighbour.

Perhaps if you read some of the previous posts, you may notice that exactly this point has been made……
You made a statement of fact and then went back on it claiming ‘outlier‘ status on a country with one of the highest gun murder numbers in the world.
If we went a little deeper we might just find that there are more countries with relatively strict gun laws but high gun death numbers based on the shenanigans of their neighbours.
It is not a fact that strict gun laws equals low gun crime, there is more to it…..

 

[Terry - Somerset]

no one cares for several cases of wine…

Were the wine coming into the UK you would be right.

But going into a country with strict Islamic laws ..... alcohol and other intoxicants are forbidden in the Quran, as they are a bad habit that drives people away from the remembrance of God

Like cocaine arriving in Dover - they do care very much! Turn up at immigration with a bottle of whisky and 90% of the time it would be seized for destruction. Or for sale on the black market to ex-pats!

 

[artie]

no one cares for several cases of wine…

O I think they do.

But more importantly, if it worked for several cases of wine and spirits it should work for several cases of Tec-9s