Colorado theater shooting...
Out of context: Reply #229
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- BaskerviIle0
A little bit of background on UK gun laws and their impact for anyone interested.
Famously the majority of our police don't carry guns. This is because gun crime is very low by global standards.According to this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis…
it's 0.46 deaths per 100,000 population (as opposed to 10.27 in the US).
Our equivalent of the Columbine massacre was in a little town in Scotland called Dunblane in 1996. A gunman shot 16 pupils and a teacher in a primary school (Tennis player Andy Murray was present at the school on the day of the attack, when he was 8 years old).
This caused such a reaction that the government brought in the 1997 firearms act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu...This essentially banned the private ownership of handguns almost completely. After this, there was a gun amnesty. More than 160,000 guns were handed into the police following this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/16…
This ban is so complete that even guns used for Olympic shooting events are banned, so our Olympic team have to go and train in other countries. The government are lifting the law for the next few weeks so allow the Olympic shooting events for our London Olympics.
In 2008 there were only 48 gun related deaths in the UK. Typically in the US there are about 30,000 per year.
Obviously we are a very different country to the US, smaller and with no way near the same history or relationship to guns in our culture. But it is fair to say that after a national gun-related tragedy, we did change our gun laws and it has had a big effect.
I've lived in London most of my life, and these days if you do ever hear of someone being shot, more often than not it's with a modified replica gun, altered to shoot live rounds. That's how hard it is for people to get hold of a gun. Yes, they still manage it if needed but it's much tougher for them to do so.