Hoping that MJD and a few of you will help us out on this one. Here's the catch, you CANNOT put down 'Right to bear arms for all' as we all know that in a EU country this would never make it through parliament.

Seriously it's getting scary out here now. Fire away! (Forgive the pun )

Oh and just to demonstrate the problem. Here's a story from my home town.

First question I'd ask, is whether or not making gun ownership illegal for law-abiding citizens will make the gun crime rate go down - criminals, of course, always have guns.

Secondly, would hiring more police officers help?

Because without the only proven solution (arm the law abiding citizens), there's really not much that can be done.

IMO it's still questionable as to whether arming the populous actually makes gun crime rates go down. My thinking would be that the criminals would just get bigger guns than are legally available.

Hiring more police would of course help. Arming them to the teeth probably would as well. Recently there have been many cases of police being shot by gangs.

There is also the argument for what legalising guns does and says about the countries society. I wouldn't be comfortable personally walking around knowing everyone had a gun in their trousers...but maybe that's just me.

When you narrow the legal market for guns, you lower the numbers of guns gun manufacturers can produce for legal sales. Needless to say if they produce weapons for illegal sale, prosecution should soon follow. Lowering supply to prevent gun violence.

Only problem with that is, in a case like that, guns will just be imported from other countries by criminal organizations, eg., groups in Mexico perhaps supplying guns to groups in Italy, or Russian interests supplying Britain, etc., not to mention that such limits only affect future sales. Even if the legal supply of firearms were cut to 0%, it would take a very long time for any appreciable effect, while new and better firearms are still being illegally imported and used.

Even if all guns were immediately confiscated from every single law abiding citizen on the planet, the criminals would still have guns, and still easily be able to acquire, buy, sell and trade them.

A similar parallel, for example, can be drawn make the hypothetical (and of course, since hypothetical, not 100% accurate, but, I believe, useful) situation of making, say, the Possession and Use of Knives a right that requires government registration, controls, and licensing. No matter how tightly controlled, people intending to use knives for illegal purposes would have no barrier to doing so, while the only people inconvenienced would be those intending to use knives for legal purposes.

Heroin, for example, and other such drugs, are highly illegal, lethal, and very expensive, yet can still be purchased in large quantities in any medium to large city in North America or Europe. Making those drugs illegal (lowering the supply) has done absolutely nothing to make them any more difficult to acquire or use.

Also, arming police to the teeth only helps in direct confrontation - a criminal would rarely directly confront an officer. Rather, most physical criminal acts occur against civilians, far away from the eyes of any authority. Self-defense is what you do when there's nobody else there to defend you.

Over 90% of crimes are crimes of oppertunity. (I think Doyle can give us a real stat. Mine's an estimate.)

Any given crime involving a gun is just a crime with an effective weapon. Making firearm sales illegal will not reduce the number of circulated weapons used by criminals. And there's no active way to ENFORCE the control of weapons sales if the ones doing the illegal sales do not want to be found. (Unless you go all out. Which no law enforcement department has the manpower or information resources to effectively do, otherwise drug trafficing would be wiped out here in the US.)

Now, if legal arms are removed... only the illegal arms remain. And for a criminal, that's not going to mean anything. Just easier targets. AKA: More Oppertunities.

If firearms are kept in the general populace... the real statistic you'll find going down is not the number of gun crimes, but the number of crimes of oppertunity. See Texas for example. I rarely see any violent crime incidents in the news.

Why? Because there's this average of four guns per household or something. You don't get very many crimes of oppertunity when there's the chance that it's not an oppertunity, but a suicide move.

However, for those violent gun crime incidents I do see... there was nothing that was going to stop the criminal. And the last incident I remember was a guy in Temple going on a shooting rampage after killing his Ex, and got taken out, not by a cop, but by a man with a Conceal Carry liscense.

You don't act a fool because of guns, you act a fool because there's an oppertunity. You've got to deny oppertunity, and you do that by making the sides even. It's good ol' fashoned peer pressure. Act a fool, and all us other fools gonna' turn 'round N' cap yo ass.

So outside of allowing the populace to arm itself as it sees fit... the only other thing you can do to deal with violent crime is increase the aggressiveness and size of Law Enforcement. And that won't guarantee effectiveness.

And therein lies the problem. The crims are already doing robbery, assault, and murder - why would they balk at mere firearms possession? BTW, SC, if the purchasing agent presents a valid end-user certificate, the gun manufacturer has no way of stopping it if the purchasing agent diverts the guns to the black market - so that solution went south right quick.

I've sounded off before about the futility of gun bans, no need to reiterate, except to note that if an island country like the UK can't stop it... Besides, even with a magical disappearance of firearms, the crims simply go to knives, clubs, bombs, cricket bats ...

Ultimately, I think there's a problem of definition. You don't have a "gun crimes" problem - you have a "crimes of violence" problem. That's a little deeper (like, say,the Marianas Trench) Ultimately, the solution lies in changing fundamental psychologies. I sometimes think Grossman's Media Violencehypothesis might have something to it, but it'd take at least a generation at best to see a positive change if we implement his recommendations.

Absent an effective change of psychological values, the best option is deterrence. If you can't teach Johnny that it's not nice to go shooting, stabbing, and bashing people, you can at least teach him that it's not safe to do so. You've barred from discussion the possibility of re-arming the populace, which takes away the best means of taking away the crims' ability to do mayhem "safely", so your next best option is making the price too high.

That means that cops gotta get better at catching 'em, and judges and prosecutors gotta put 'em all the way inside once they're caught. That means LWOP - "Life without parole" - has to mean life - as in, you'll die in prison. If you're sentenced to twenty hard, you do twenty - hard. And Parliament is going to have to bump up the penalties, too. Even if we disallow for deterrent effect, remember - if the crim's in prison, he's not on the street committing crimes.

Unfortunately, in an EU country, hardening the penalties in the criminal justice codes might be even tougher than re-arming your population. Any party that gets tough on crime is going to be compelled to fold when the EU slaps 'em with "human rights" violations. I don't know - under the circumstances and restrictions as you've outlined 'em, I think you're screwed...